Its a fact that we no loner simply “buy” products for their material properties. What we really buy is the extra value which advertisers attach to those objects; preceived value which is typically designated by brand name and a host of slogans masquerading as “facts.” Join with me fellow comrades as I lay bare the great travesties of our time.

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Is money good or bad?

Most people, when asked this question, would probably argue that money is neither ‘good’ nor ‘bad,’ but instead takes on the ethical qualities of the one spending the money. By this reasoning, money itself is amoral—in that it does not possess a moral quality in and of itself. And yet, if we examine the nature and function of money, particularly in modern western society, a far more complex picture emerges.

Couldn’t we say that the oft quoted saying, ‘Absolute power corrupts, Absolutely’ applies not only to supreme political power, but also to the possession of great wealth? We’ve all heard stories about ordinary people who come into a substantial amount of money and then alter their personality drastically—no longer socializing with their friends, spending their time consumed with their wealth etc. To quote another saying, ‘money changes people’—yet, if money is amoral, if it merely takes on the personality of the one who possesses it, why do we have this popular conception that wealth corrupts?

The more interesting aspect of money, particularly in modern society, is its metaphysical (i.e. abstract) quality—the fact that it seems to have a certain ‘spiritual’ essence. Gone are the days when a gold coin was actually worth its weight. Now days money is purely representative—paper and coins which ‘stand in’ for something else; trinkets which represent a certain value.

Most of the larger financial transactions eliminate the tangible quality of money all together—reducing the function of exchange to a transfer of digital data. Isn’t it a scary thought that our ‘worth’ actually equates to no more than a series of ones and zeroes—a computer code which generates the perception of a number on a screen? For those who equate their value with their ‘net worth,’ it must be a sobering thought to consider that their entire life can be reduced to 00010111100000001010111100100010101…

It is this intangible ‘value’ which we strive to attain, not merely because of the ‘stuff’ we can buy with it, but also because of the status wealth affords us in modern culture.

So here are a few comments and questions to get you thinking. Feel free to send in comments or questions:

1. In many ways money (or rather the value which money represents) can be equated with ‘desire.’ The defining aspect of desire is that fact that it can never be fulfilled or completed. To what extend then have we shifted from a place where money serves us (we use it to buy stuff) to the point where we serve money (we work all week to get more money, but never have enough)?

2. Does the widespread desire for fame (we want to be an actor/actress or famous singer)—reflect the fact that many of us long to be commodified; to be turned into a product that can be bought and sold around the world?

3. Throughout recent history, many tragedies (environmental, personal, communal) have been caused by companies and corporations who have damaged others in the pursuit of ‘profit.’ Yet, when companies are pulled up on their ‘unethical’ practices, or various strategies they have employed which have endangered human life, the environment and so on, they defend their actions by appealing to the right to acquire wealth–‘We were just trying to make money’ (perhaps the cigarette/gambling industries would be a good case in point). Does the ‘right’ to acquire wealth justify actions which prove harmful to humankind and secondly, is the acquisition of wealth a ‘right’?

Companies, nations, institutions in the modern era survive only as long as they can assure their shareholders and financial supporters that they are ‘turning a profit.’ But it is not enough simply to make a profit each financial year, the company must show ‘growth.’ Is this pursuit of ‘growth’ (on a personal and corporate level) healthy?

Why do I need to buy it? I’ve got three others just like it, my life will not improve in any real way once I have it and I’ll probably just buy another one in a year or so anyway? So what the hell is compelling me to buy this useless thing?

We’ve all experienced it—or most of us have—that moment in a shopping centre, surrounded by countless trinkets and electronic doodads, where we feel the compulsion to buy something ‘just for the hell of it.’ Advertisers push this kind of consumptive recklessness by promoting the myth of ‘retail therapy.’ When you’re feeling down, or bored, or happy, or whatever—get yourself to the nearest shopping centre and CONSUME! After all, it’s good for you.

This compulsion to spend money on ‘stuff’ is symptomatic of a serious psychological shift which has taken place in the West over the past 100 years or so—a shift which has gone hand in hand with the dominance of capitalism and consumerism and a lot of other ‘isms.’ One of the main products of capitalism in the West has been a decisive shift in the way in which we enjoy ourselves.

While it is true that we still enjoy many of the same kinds of activities we have always enjoyed (eating, talking, sports, entertainment, sex, etc), those activities tend to be inextricably bound to the consumptive drive of capitalism—the need to buy, to consume, to discard. The things we enjoy most are those which we buy; those which we can purchase and take home and own. More than this, we enjoy those things which we can experience repetitively and which will be replaced within a few months or years—mp3 players, computers, game consoles, mobile phones etc. We experience immense enjoyment in owning the ‘newest’ and ‘latest,’ while knowing full well that it is obsolete even before we’ve taken the stupid thing home.

The motto of modern advertising is surely that quantity is far more important that quality. We don’t want the best; we want the latest. The music industry is the example par excellence of the way in which we consume commodities (and celebrities) with a seemingly limitless appetite. This is what TV shows like Popstars and Australian Idol thrive on—the need for something ‘new,’ or ‘fresh.’ It’s to the point now where we don’t really care about the end product itself, what we want is the feeling of novelty—the feeling that we are experiencing something genuinely new. The irony is of course that none of this stuff is new. The television sit-coms, movies, songs—all of these are typically rehashes of old material; same format, different actors/singers.

We don’t genuinely what something ‘new’—something confronting or difficult to assimilate—instead we want something old, rewrapped in new packaging. Ultimately, we want to consume the same ‘products’ over and over again precisely because consumption is the way in which we enjoy. This is perhaps a key reason why obesity is rampant in most Western countries around the world. We are addicted to consumption and have no idea how to enjoy apart from the apparatus of capitalism—the need to buy, consume and discard. Doesn’t this mechanism of consumption explain the appeal of ‘reality TV’—the ability to experience ‘real life’ as a packaged, marketed product which can be consumed?

In our time, can we even imagine a society which isn’t governed by a drive to consume countless technological trinkets and objects of entertainment?

With the advent of reality TV, we in the West have harnessed ‘real life’ and sold it as the ultimate commodity.

Isn’t this symptomatic of the fact that we can no longer experience something (let alone ‘enjoy’ it) unless it is packaged in the form of a commodity to be bought and sold—to be consumed like any other ‘product’?

The same goes for ‘virtual’ lives online. We gain far more pleasure from ‘living’ in a virtual reality world than from living in the real world. We perform the most sundry tasks ‘online’ and all of a sudden they take on an almost magical quality. Likewise we watch people on television living their boring day to day lives (lives which we would hate to live ourselves) and yet we are transfixed to our TV screens.

The irony of a movie like the Matrix is that the true fantasy world is not the boring, day to day, vulgar world of the matrix itself, but rather the exciting, gritty life of the survivors who live in technologically adapted caverns beneath the ground. Neo’s dull existence as an office clerk is supposedly the ‘fake’ reality, whereas the harsh life he is rudely awakened to in the first movie is ‘real.’

In this future world—traumatized by some cataclysmic event (nuclear war etc)—the surviving humans fantasize (or are forced to fantasize) about living in apartment blocks, paying rent, wearing a suit each day and all the other things which go along with ‘life.’ The ‘Judas’ character in the movie actually chooses this dull digitized life in contrast to the constant struggle of ‘reality.’

It seems ironic that we have made a similar choice. We too have chosen the digitized life, over and against a much harsher (yet infinitely more enjoyable) reality. We would prefer to watch someone else live out their lives, that live our own.

Just a thought…

Those of us who don’t work in ‘the sciences’ or teach mathematics in high school, might well relate to the question, ‘how is algebra ever going to help me in the real world.’ For some, the notion of quadratic equations and mathematical proofs produce an inexplicable sense of excitement and intrigue. For the rest of us, abstract mathematics is right up there with shoe horn collecting and reading the English dictionary from cover to cover. Even the numerous attempts to popularize mathematics through the medium of television have little success in luring the non-mathematics among us to the wonderful world of mathematics (note the TV show Numbers for instance, where the nerdy, quirky, unconventional maths geek who solves mysteries for the FBI routinely spouts, ‘We all use math, every day…’).

Pythagoras of Samos (ever notice that these Greek philosophers never have a last name?) is perhaps best known throughout the western world for the theorem a2+b2=c2 – ‘the area of the square built upon the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the areas of the squares upon the remaining sides.’ Even the most ignorant of us can remember learning about ‘Pythagoras and triangles and stuff’ in high school. What is less well known is the degree to which Pythagoras, and his followers, brought about a decisive shift in the way humanity conceived of the notion of the human ‘soul.’

Pythagoras, you see, was not only a remarkable mathematician and philosopher; he was also a certifiable nutbag. What we know of Pythagoras is derived from the writings of later philosophers and is therefore less than reliable at times. However, what we do know is that Pythagoras founded a religious order (or cult) around the notion of the transmigration of souls (a belief in the reincarnation of the immortal soul after death) militant vegetarianism and a set of bizarre prohibitions. Some of the rules inscribed by Pythagoras’ order include the following:

1. To abstain from eating beans
2. Not to pick up what was fallen
3. Not to break bread
4. Not to stir the fire with iron
5. Not to let swallows share one’s roof.
6. When the pot is taken off the fire, not to leave the mark of it in the ashes, but to stir them together.
7. When you rise from the bedclothes, roll them together and smooth out the impress of the body.

One wonders if Pythagoras’ religious convictions were not the result of some obsessive compulsive disorder. What is most significant about these religious beliefs however, is the notion of the eternal soul—the belief that man has some essential ‘spirit’ which passes from one body to another as it moves from life to death.

Prior to Pythagoras and those who thought as he did, Greeks had traditionally viewed humanity in terms of three specific entities:
a) The body: bones, muscle, tissue etc.
b) Psyche: the essential ‘life principle’ of the human (located in the head)
c) Thymos: the seat of the mind, the will and emotions (consciousness- located in the lungs).
In death, the thymos and body ceased and only the psyche lived on—though in the form of a shade (eidolon), or phantom: a shadowy double of the living being (the ‘life principle’ without consciousness). Pythagoras and his companions developed the idea of ‘the immortal soul’ which lived on after death and was then ‘reincarnated’ within a different entity (whether animal or even plant). The traditional notion of the psyche was thus redefined to incorporate both the ‘life principle’ and ‘the seat of the mind’ (the conscious self)—that part of the human which ‘lived on’ after death, while the body withered.

It is this notion of the soul (what we essentially call ‘us’) that characterizes many of the modern ideas of the soul, particularly in the west. The soul is autonomous from other souls and the body in which it resides, and death merely serves to separate the human soul from the body. The soul then, according to Pythagoras’ view, is in a sense divine—possessing the same quality of ‘eternality’ which characterized later Greek conceptions of God. These Greek ideas of the divine in turn influenced the early Christians, who then re-interpreted the Hebrew deity Yahweh in terms of certain abstract ideas such as eternality, omnipotence (all powerful) and the like.

To some extent we’re lumping an awful lot in poor Pythagoras’ lap and it is simply not accurate to suggest that he alone (or he and his followers) conceived of the modern notion of ‘the soul.’ It is perhaps more realistic to suggest that Pythagoras (that crazy, brilliant, bean fascist) set in motion a certain trajectory or line of though which has endured and developed right up to the modern era.
I find the ‘development’ of such ideas fascinating. It prompts me to ask; does this suggest that we have primarily ‘invented’ the notion of the soul, or have humans merely developed a better understanding of their essential nature over the years?

Suggested Reading

John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy.
Jan Bremmer, The Early Greek concept of the Soul.
Jan Bremmer, The Rise and Fall of the Afterlife.