By Luke Vanderlinden
The American people have demonstrated by their election of Donald J. Trump into the office of president that the greatest significator for success in our modern age is wealth. As the popular saying goes, “Money makes the world go round.” In this way, the deluding potency of the Supreme Lord lulls souls into a false sense of security, thinking that their material assets guarantee perpetual comfort and happiness. However, sastra warns against cultivating such a worldly mentality, as it disables us from taking shelter of the Lord’s mercy:
The Gospel of Matthew 19:24
“Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God.”
Srimad Bhagavatam 1.8.26
“My Lord, Your Lordship can easily be approached, but only by those who are materially exhausted. One who is on the path of [material] progress, trying to improve himself with respectable parentage, great opulence, high education and bodily beauty, cannot approach You with sincere feeling.”
A similar message comes in the second stanza of Srila Bhaktivedanta Svami Prabhupada’s Vrndavane Bhajan, a prayer he wrote several years after accepting the vanaprastha order of life.
Everyone has abandoned me, seeing me as penniless, Wife, relatives, friends, brothers, everyone.
This is misery, but it gives me a laugh. I sit alone and laugh. In this maya samsara, whom do I really love?
Where have all my loving father and mother gone to now? And where are all my elders, who were my own folk? Who will give me news of them, tell me who?
All that is left of this family life is a list of names.
The purport of the opening lines to this stanza is that materialistic householder life is held together by the glue of wealth. So long as there is material prosperity, one’s wife and children will adore him; but as soon as poverty comes, the once doting family members turn sour.
This is the danger of excessive attachment to material wealth. Time will tell if the president-elect will be able to follow-through on his promise to make America great (i.e. “rich) again.
ISKCON communities must also check to see that their relationships are not primarily mediated by the flow of money. The following essays were written as a summary study of a book by 20th century sociologist, Georg Simmel. Our humble hope is that these essays will inspire a greater commitment on the part of aspiring sadhakas to abandon their affinity for worldly gain and take deeper shelter in Sridevi’s spiritual opulences, aikantiki bhakti and bhagavan prema, the human being’s only real weath.
1) The Power of Money Approaches Omnipotence
On its own, money is devoid of value. Its power manifests only in the process of exchange. As Simmel writes, “The meaning of money lies in the fact that it will be given away” (510). Without a willing partner with whom a monetary transaction can take place, money’s value reverts to that of its original substance— slips of ink-stained paper, round discs of metal, or pieces of seashell or carved wood, as is the case in some indigenous cultures.
However, within a highly developed human culture, where money’s exchange function is the life-giving bloodstream within the social body (469), the potential power of money is limitless. Money stands ready to purchase any object the heart desires. With money, one feels himself a master of his environment. He can even extend his control over others. Sex, murder, theft… history shows that people will do nearly anything if offered sufficient monetary compensation.
It is from this that Simmel concludes that the psychological effect of money “possesses a significant relationship to the notion of God” (236). Quoting the German theologian Nicolas de Cusa, Simmel explains that God is that being in whom all disagreements and contradictions are pacified and resolved, the coincidentia oppisitorum. Thus, those who understand and relate to the natural world via such a notion of God enjoy an inimitable feeling of ease and tranquility. For them, nothing inhabits a foreign realm. Everything is familiar, as it were, belonging to the creation of the Lord. Like the coincidentia oppisitorum feature of God, money is capable of bringing together any number of opposing values. For this reason, money appears to grant its bearer a sort of omnipotence. Nothing seems to be outside the rich man’s domain; he feels he can acquire everything at will. The devout man’s sense of religious well-being finds a parallel feeling of comfort and satisfaction brought on by the possession of sufficient quantities of money. This is one reason why religious and monetary interests often find themselves at odds with one another. As Jesus Christ told his followers, “No servant can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money” (Luke, 16:13).
In his analysis, Simmel goes one step further, showing that money is a tangible symbol for the unchanging, metaphysical substance that many philosophers believe is the origin of phenomenal reality. He writes, “Money is the symbol in the empirical world of the inconceivable unity of being, out of which the world, in all its breadth, diversity, energy and reality, flows” (497). A modern example can be seen in Einstein’s revolutionary discovery, E=MC². All matter is now understood as a transformation of energy. Similarly, within the money culture, all objects can be translated into their particular monetary equivalent. Money is the “absolute means” (236) that can mediate between all relative values. Furthermore, although it is constantly changing hands, money is never actually ‘spent,’ as other objects, like food, entertainment, clothing, etc. disappear or gradually wear away in the course of being used. Likewise, the pure, metaphysical reality that is believed to give rise to manifest existence is never exhausted, although it undergoes an endless series of transformations. In this way, the power of money imitates that mystical power behind the movement of the universe. Hence the saying: “Money makes the world go round.”
2) Money Disrupts Relations between People
The indifference of money is what allows it to stand in as a universal value, ready to replace any type of commodity, but this same flexibility, as Simmel notes, “is conducive to the removal of the personal element from human relationships” (297). Whereas a man was once dependent on the people of his local community to provide goods for the livelihood of his family, with the rise of the money economy, and the mass-production of consumer goods it yields, that same dependency is dispersed across a vast network of persons. This has the effect of impressing upon modern man that it is his own money that secures his well-being, and not the collective effort of an entire community.
The advent of the factory and the wage-laborer, which Simmel shows to be necessary correlates of the expansion of the money economy, even further removed the personal element from human exchange. Simmel writes, “The more objective and impersonal an object is the better it is suited to more people … consumable material, in order to be acceptable and enjoyable to a very large number of individuals, cannot be designed for subjective differentiation of taste” (455). This proliferation of impersonal goods, each attributed an exact price, produces an entire world of consumption, wherein all relations are reduced to their monetary value. In this world, people are fungible. They take on an objective quality. It is not the bank teller, the car salesman, the doctor, or the politician whom we value, but their “objective achievements” (296). In the following passage, Simmel brilliantly summarizes the modern situation:
“Money results in a universal objectification of transactions, in an elimination of all personal nuances and tendencies, and, further, [because] the number of relationships based on money is constantly increasing, that the significance of one person for another can increasingly be traced back, even though often in a concealed form, to monetary interests. In this way, an inner barrier develops between people, a barrier, however, that is indispensable for the modern form of life” (477).
Simmel goes on to explain that this distance in human interaction serves the psychological function of making overcrowded, urban life bearable. By thus muting the personal and emotional content in human dealings, the money economy allows highly concentrated populations to co-exist in apparent peace, being effectively estranged from one another, as if indifferent to each other’s very existence as people.
For this reason, as Simmel observes, in modern times “the contrast that existed between the native and the stranger has been eliminated” (227). This is because the stranger is the ideal candidate for financial dealings. As money exerts greater and greater influence within human society, invading nearly all forms of human transactions, it becomes difficult to maintain friendships, family relations, and even marriages, without having such relations disrupted by the impersonal force of money.
3) Money Usurps the Goals of Life
“The inner polarity of the essence of money,” Simmel writes, “lies in its being the absolute means and thereby becoming psychologically the absolute purpose for most people” (232). In the first thesis, we showed that the power of money approaches omnipotence. Because money can be exchanged for virtually anything, it becomes an intensely sought-after object, despite the fact that, in and of itself, it bears no real value. The result of this paradox is the inevitable emergence of two cultural dispositions, which Simmel terms “cynicism and the blasi attitude” (255). As life’s tangible values—food, shelter, social position, even love—become purchasable, so long as one possesses a sufficient quantity of money, people are no longer able to distinguish between higher and lower modes of life. The heroes of modern society are, therefore, for the most part, those who possess extraordinary wealth: professional athletes, movie stars, and innovative CEOs. Education is reduced to a means of making money to secure a livelihood. The ennoblement of character, along with the other finer goals of life, are forgotten. The technical advancement that the money economy brings with it, by facilitating the exchange of goods and ideas, and also increasing the pace of life, appears to take on an absolute significance of its own. As Simmel wisely remarks:
“It is true that we now have acetylene and electrical light instead of oil lamps; but the enthusiasm for the progress achieved in lighting makes us sometimes forget that the essential thing is not the lighting itself but what becomes more fully visible. People’s ecstasy concerning the triumphs of the telegraph and telephone often makes them overlook the fact that what really matters is the value of what one has to say, and that, compared with this, the speed or slowness of the means of communication is often a concern that could attain its present status only by usurpation. The same is true in numerous other areas” (481).
In this way, the money economy and its various features obscure life’s actual values, reducing all qualitative aspects of human existence to their quantitative equivalents. The acquisition of money becomes the essential, pressing question on the minds of everyone. And if time does arise for deeper, philosophical or religious contemplation, the cynical attitude produced by the money culture quickly snuffs out such investigations.
4) Money Leads the Soul into Bondage
In the First Letter of St. Paul to Timothy, it is written, “The love of money is the root of all kinds of evils” (1 Timothy, 6:10). If this is true, why and how might it be so? Simmel shows that the spread of the money economy inevitably leads to specialized activity and competition. As more and more economic transactions are facilitated by money, the network of exchange expands and diversifies, inviting large-scale production and the division of labor, so that merchants (now business owners) can capitalize on the increased opportunity for trade. Money thus facilitates both the producer and the consumer in their production and consumption of goods, for this is money’s very purpose. However, along with an expanded network of trade and production, there is an ever-increasing dependence on industrial infrastructure. It is a common fallacy that possessing more money makes life proportionately easier. The reality is that owning more money usually demands an equal increase in spent time and energy to manage and protect one’s wealth. Similarly, as the money culture expands, Simmel writes, “a larger proportion of civilized man remains forever enslaved, in every sense of the word, in the interest in technics” (231). In other words, the many steps in the process of production, trade, and consumption, become so numerous that they absorb the entirety of one’s attention, to the extent that “every real purpose completely disappears from consciousness.” While it appears at the outset that money, and the technological advancement it brings, offers a greater degree of mastery over the various ends of life, the actual result is that modern man finds himself entangled in a myriad of “distractions and endless superficial needs” (483).
The fluidity of money that allows it to be converted into virtually any other object carries with it a type of freedom that cannot be found in solid assets. With ordinary possessions, such as land, a home, clothing, and so on, the owner is bound to a particular physical locale, or must carry with him a whole load of objects, if he wishes to pack up and move to a new place. Money, on the other hand contains a wealth that is both mobile and filled with unlimited potential. However, the freedom money affords is deceptive. By converting solid assets into liquid cash, we lose the concrete value of hard-earned possessions. To illustrate this, Simmel offers the example of a peasant who sells his share of land for money:
“It is true that the frequent conversion of obligations into money payments in the eighteenth century gave to the peasants a monetary freedom. Yet such conversions took away from him what cannot be bought by money and what primarily gives freedom its value—the trustworthy object of personal activity. To the peasant, the land meant something altogether different from a mere property value; for him it meant the possibility of useful activity, a centre of interest, a value that determined his life, which he lost as soon as he owned only the money value of his land instead of the land itself” (399).
According to Simmel, this type of monetary liberation constitutes an “extreme danger” (402). Exchanging possessions for liquid cash is a purely negative freedom. One is no longer bound by the responsibilities associated with his previous ownership, but unless he replaces those responsibilities with new ones, he risks depriving his life of its definite and meaningful form. As Simmel writes, the freedom of money “favours that emptiness and instability that allows one to give full rein to every accidental, whimsical, and tempting impulse” (402). The present age of consumer goods has freed the average man from having to acquire his own land, build his own home, grow his own crop, sew his own clothes, etc., but in exchange he is utterly dependent upon the system of industry. Whereas these assets once served as important extensions of his personality, being expressions of his own work, they now stand merely as mass-produced objects of consumption. Furthermore, the process of local exchange strengthened personal relationships within a community of interdependent individuals. Far from exchanging this interdependence for a more meaningful form of freedom, “we have become slaves of the production process … we have become the slaves of the products” (483).
5) Money Collapses Spiritual & Contemplative Culture
There is a positive reciprocal relationship between the money economy and the specialization of labor.
Increasing complexity within a network of trade, as well as diversity of production, both rely on the pervasive acceptance of money to facilitate transactions. While technological culture has seen extraordinary advancement in recent times, individual culture, as Simmel points out, has not seen equal progress (448). Indeed, the capacity of mechanized labor and computation has far surpassed the comprehension of the ordinary worker, who is more like a supplemental instrument to the productive machine than a skilled laborer in his own right. Now the individual’s very personality is under attack by the rising influence of the monetary culture. Simmel writes:
“Since under very rapid money transactions possessions are no longer classified according to the category of a specific life-content, that inner bond, amalgamation and devotion in no way develops which, though it restricts the personality, none the less gives support and content to it. This explains why our age, which, on the whole, certainly possesses more freedom than any previous one, is unable to enjoy it properly” (403).
Due to their being easily sold and purchased, modern man’s possessions are, for the most part, deprived of meaning, excepting their monetary value. The modern worker’s very life has become a commodity of wage-labor, for which his only reward is a weekly check that will be exchanged for an assortment of consumable goods. Just as we saw, in the second thesis, how money disrupts meaningful relations between people, so it also interferes between persons and commodities (478). The result is a collective “distancing from nature,” and the “particularly abstract existence that urban life, based on the money economy, has forced upon us” (479).
While technology and the money culture appear to permit an increasing dominance over nature (for, as Simmel points out, the view of nature as wholly subject to material calculation is the “theoretical counterpart to the institution of money” (446), which constantly reduces the entire spectrum of qualitative values to their quantitative—i.e. calculable—equivalent), these powers actually serve to subjugate modern man more completely to impersonal, material forces. “The control of nature by technology,” Simmel explains, “is possible only at the price of being enslaved in it and by dispensing with spirituality as the central point in life” (484). We see here the same principles that were at play in theses number three and four. However, where the fourth thesis considered the impact of money on the individual personality, this fifth and final thesis takes account of its cost on society as a whole. In the following excerpt, Simmel offers his diagnosis:
“In the case of the present age, in which the preponderance of technology obviously signifies a predominance of clear intelligent consciousness, as a cause as well as an effect, I have emphasized that spirituality and contemplation, stunned by the clamorous splendor of the scientific-technological age, have to suffer for it by a faint sense of tension and vague longing. They feel as if the whole meaning of our existence were so remote that we are unable to locate it and are constantly in danger of moving away from rather than closer to it. … I believe that this secret restlessness, this helpless urgency that lies below the threshold of consciousness, that drives modern man from socialism to Nietzsche, from Bocklin to impressionism, from Hegel to Schopenhauer and back again, not only originates in the bustle and excitement of modern life, but that, conversely, this phenomenon is frequently the expression, symptom and eruption of this innermost condition. The lack of something definite at the centre of the soul impels us to search for momentary satisfaction in ever-new stimulations, sensations and external activities. Thus it is that we become entangled in the instability and helplessness that manifests itself as the tumult of the metropolis, as the mania for traveling, as the wild pursuit of competition and as the typically modern disloyalty with regard to taste, style, opinions, and personal relationships. The significance of money for this kind of life follows quite logically from the premises that all the discussions in this book have identified” (484).
From Simmel’s vivid depiction of modern life, we can see that its core themes are fully embodied in the symbol of money: mobility, indifference to all relative values, lack of personal loyalties, and the absence of a tangible meaningfulness as such. The intellectual, rational, and calculating faculties of modern man, which are being constantly fed by the institution of money, have eaten away at the emotional content of life, stifling spiritual and contemplative culture. Where these heart-and-soul-based practices do spring up today, they are very quickly commodified, in the form of popular literature, workshops, weekend retreats, cultural festivals, ‘spiritual’ tourism, megachurches, and iconic gurus. However popular yoga and spirituality may have become in recent years, instances of deeply devoted and disciplined spiritual and contemplative practice are increasingly rare. This fact testifies to the ever-expanding influence of the money culture, and its seemingly omnipotent capacity to uproot and replace all of life’s absolute values.
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