When I was very young I was living on barely enough money for a roof and food and not much else.
After my daughter was born, her first winter she was an infant wrapped in blankets. Her second winter she was a toddler and needed a coat. I looked over my bills. I decided the telephone was the least necessary and used that money to get the cutest red teddy bear jacket you’ve ever seen.
I juggled that phone bill for months before I got back on track. I developed mad scraping-by skills but I never learned to love money.
The love of money
Lack of money is terrifying. It’s starving, ragged, and freezing. It means no safe place to sleep, not even a car, alone in the dark. You get the idea.
With the Monster of No Money chasing you, it’s no shock that you would be scrambling for every dime you could get your hands on.
It drives some people to get rich. Maybe one in 100,000. For the other 99,999, there is a handful of dimes between themselves and the monster lurking on the perimeter.
And some of those people learn to love money more than anything else. All kinds of evil grow out of fear, from grasping stinginess and compulsive greed all the way to mugging and drug dealing.
It’s not just the poor
Most poor people — like most people — don’t want money because they love it. They want it because they love the safety and comfort of themselves and their families and friends. They work 60 hours a week, not because they love the money, but because they know about the Monster of No Money and want to keep it far away from themselves and the people they love.
I think for people who are born rich the Monster of No Money is just an abstraction. The ones who clawed their way to success know about the monster. However, I think rich people also sometimes love money because — I suspect but can’t prove — it’s just a way to keep score.
At the bottom of our hearts, we are apes. Piling up money is a way for modern apes to play “King of the Mountain.”
Which means Jeff Bezos wins.
I suspect that is why the former president despises Bezos as much as he does. The point of Trump’s entire life was and will be to become the ape at the top of the mountain — jumping up and down, waving a stick, and baring his fangs.
Love of money leads to crime among the poor, obviously.
It is much more likely to lead to crime among the rich.
I’m not saying all rich people are gangsters. For the poor, crime is a fairly bright line. You don’t sell drugs, break into a house, or rob a 7-Eleven by accident.
The rich do commit bright-line crimes but when you are dealing in millions of dollars it gets easier to be fuzzy on details like insider trading or tax evasion. It gets even easier if the love of money is the focus of your life.
Ignoring inconvenient laws becomes fundamental. Besides, if you get caught you hire a lawyer and walk away.
With a few rare exceptions, only the poor go to prison.
So where are we?
Love of money = evil. Love of people = good. In addition to that, the sky is blue and the Earth is a ball.
What’s interesting here, is that the rich are just like us, except they have money (I read that somewhere). Together with the poor, their love of money is the root of all the evil in the world.
But the evil that stalks all of us is the Monster of No Money.