Rob’s comments are in italics. Derek’s comments are in normal font.
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Today, our topic is, is money the root of all evil? This is something that I think people probably have heard in different forms, maybe from religion. And I wondered if we could pick apart how this still fits into people's psyche today.
The first thing to say is that the quote, as it stands, "money is the root of all evil," is inaccurate, which is just as well because actually it's nonsensical. I mean, money, as we've seen from other discussions in this podcast, is simply a tool. It's just like any tool that can be used constructively or destructively. Certainly, that's the case with money. And what it is, at the end of the day, just to remind ourselves, is it's a means of trading. In the last analysis, time and effort that I spend for time and effort that somebody else spends, and everything that we buy or sell is a result of some work. At some stage, energy and attention have been put into producing those goods or those services.
And the idea is to track an exchange of those activities. And of course, one of the things is that there are always people trying to game the system and get a free ride and actually get somebody else's work without doing an equivalent value of work themselves. So the next thing to say is that the quote, as it's stated barely there, is inaccurate. It comes from the Bible. But what the Bible actually says is that the love of money is the root of all evil. And perhaps, perhaps evil is not a very fashionable term unless you're strongly religious these days. What do we mean by evil? I think we've all got a fair idea of things that we would say are undoubtedly evil. Anything which causes pain or distress to another human being.
And the most obvious example of that is, of course, warfare. And what warfare is, is simply robbery with violence on a grand scale. That's what it always has been and it always will be, and certainly in a straightforward way. If you go back to the dawn of human societies, you had a ruler of one area, a king or an emperor or a warlord, and if he had covetous eyes on the wealth of neighbours they brought forward to steal it. So certainly the great majority of crimes are motivated by a love of money taking precedence over any other considerations or regard for other people or their welfare.
Value Exchange
It sounds to me like it's taking value without providing value. Obviously warfare is an extreme version of that because you're causing extreme levels of harm, but it's still taking and not giving.
Exactly. So that's certainly one example. If we look at the other challenges that we're facing in the world right now, one of them is obviously the loss of biodiversity, the infliction of various insults on the environment, on the systems of the earth that we depend on. And plainly, a large driver of that is also coming from a love of money and an eclipsing of other considerations.
Kind of a short term approach as well, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah. And then if we look at the phenomenon of corporate life, particularly large scale businesses, international scale businesses, they are institutionally geared to maximising profit. And in fact, this has even led to legal cases, particularly in the United States, to establish that if the directors are not optimising the returns to their shareholders, then they're in breach of fiduciary duty, and therefore they're obligated to do that regardless of any other considerations. If you look at other practices we've got that are not healthy, built-in obsolescence is obviously one of them in all its forms. Whether it's simply things wearing out rapidly and being unserviceable for lack of parts or lack of information or lack of ability to dismantle them and repair them, that plainly is a net negative contribution to our wellbeing. And whilst a driver of that is the love of money, then I think finally, if we look at the health problems that are rampant in most of the developed world, we can see that these result in part from poor diet, poor living practices. They result from, to some degree, poverty. And then as people have become more and more aware, a lot of the measures which are supposed to patch our health up and cure our ailments are either not effective or completely counterproductive.
And once again, I think there's a significant view taking hold that enhancing suits the profits of the pharmaceutical companies for people to remain sick and to be on medications. I don't know what your outlook is, but I've managed to avoid taking medications, except very, very occasionally for my entire life so far, and I'm doing my best to keep it that way.
I think that's a good general policy.
Yeah. So if we were to reinstate money in its role as purely a facilitator of trade between people and we were to operate according to the golden rule principle of not doing things to others that we would not wish to be done to ourselves, it's pretty plain that a lot of the unworkabilities in this world would automatically get taken care of. And so I think we can fairly say that the love of money is, if not the root of all evil, certainly the root behind a substantial number of other evils. But one thing that I would also say is that there is a possible negative consequence of dwelling on that concern about money itself being evil in that certainly at times in my life I have felt that the pursuit of money was, if you like, non-spiritual.
The Negative Consequences of Guilt
And I think a lot of people have guilt around that rather than looking deeper to see what it is, if anything, that one should be guilty for. So I would say that the concern that money might be evil probably has a negative consequence for a lot of people in terms of inhibiting the enthusiasm with which they might otherwise lean towards developing productive and worthwhile businesses.
I think it's worth pointing out that it's possible to do much more good in the world when you're not skint.
I think that's a very good point.
This is what our mentor Perry Marshall talks about a bit as well. I think I'm hearing echoes of his voice.
Absolutely, absolutely. Of course, there's another aspect that beyond a certain point, apart from being an obsessive method of scorekeeping, the acquisition of totally disproportionate amounts of wealth, the billionaires, the scale of things is actually a pursuit not so much of wealth as a thing in itself, but of wealth as an access to power. And probably the most extreme examples we see of that are in the so-called charitable foundations, or philanthropic foundations of extremely rich people. And I think more and more people are coming to see that. The most egregious example probably is Bill Gates. And although he portrays himself as generously and magnanimously giving his wealth away for the benefit of other people, the extraordinary thing is that in the last few years that he's been supposedly making his grand philanthropic gestures, his actual own net worth has actually doubled, gone from 53 million to 114 billion the last time I looked. And so this gives him enormous power. He makes enormous grants to people that you wouldn't expect to be in receipt of charitable funding.
The BBC is one of them, the Guardian newspaper, which was an alternative force in the array of British press, until relatively recently, has received hundreds of millions of pounds from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. And it would be naive to imagine that organisations that are probably in some financial danger otherwise, who have received largess on that scale, are not going to have their reporting skewed by the considerations.
Just on the topic of Bill Gates, he recently has become quite a large investor in farmland in the United States. I was reading a book, actually, about the erosion of our soils, and it commented that in the Roman Empire there was a significant increase in soil erosion when landlords stopped living on the land. And you had absentee landlords who just wanted to extract the most amount of profit. They didn't have any skin in the game in the land itself, because they weren't there. And actually, that's surely what Bill Gates is. He's an absentee landlord.
The ultimate one!
He's the ultimate one, yeah. So surely that's the same thing. And we were talking earlier about these corporations where the directors have been prosecuted for not pursuing the shareholders' interests, but again, they're presumably absent from the day-to-day rulings of the business and the people that the business touches. They're not present, they're not there. So it's this issue of absenteeism that I think structurally enables this love of money to cause so much damage.
It's an interesting point, then, about the monoculture of land, and that being a factor in the possible collapse of the Roman Empire. There are a number of factors there, of course, that it is becoming too resource rich, too resource consumption intensive, and being overstretched with the administration of an empire. One of the factors was certainly that in Roman times, they abandoned what had been a practice in the ancient world of having what were called debt jubilees. This was something that was recommended in the Bible. It was something that Hammurabi decreed, something that a number of ancient kings and emperors prior to the Roman era decreed, because it was inevitable that essentially agriculturalists would incur debt and would occasionally be unable to repay it on time if they had bad harvests and so forth, which resulted in land being transferred to the creditors and increasingly monopolised. And many of the ancient rulers and advisors to rulers realised that this would be destructive to society. And that is, of course, certainly the situation that we have in the world today, where we have this entirely debt-based currency, and this is reaching a point that it can no longer be sustained.
The wisdom that we seem to need to learn actually appears to be old wisdom that we've forgotten and somehow need to relearn and reapply.
I think so, yeah.
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