Introduction

2013-03-03T19:46:00.005-08:00

1. More or less money has nothing to do with your status as a person. You can be an amazing, potent, abundant, solid, glowing person and have not a cent.

2. Being rich usually means you are materialistic, enjoy being better than others (egotistical/hierarchical), ignorant and blind (do not understand the structures through which you have benefit, and don't care to) unless you have a weak moral backbone (know the structures and how most individuals struggle within them and don't mind). Often those with more money are more susceptible to the lure of the seven sins (and I name these, not as a religious individual, but because they are the seven sins for a reason): greed, lust, sloth, gluttony, pride, wrath, and envy.

3. The American modern culture is completely run by the seven sins as incentives. When one is focused on obtaining things in order to have to do less, get more sex/sexual attention, get more things to consume generally, get more attention generally, resent others that have gotten more things than you, feel anger towards something/somebody/generally because you are not getting what you want, you are always miserable, empty, meaningless, and completely consumed with the difficulty and infuriation of life. This is what a capitalist culture does to its participants. And money is the tickets to the carnival.

4. This blog does not position itself against capitalism. Adam Smith dreamed of a regulated and small-scale system that worked on the individual level, where a person could create a business that would because successful due to the vote-by-dollar of its customers (I do not say consumers because when an individual has become a consumer, it is because they have been mentally played with - see later - and are no longer a discerning individual that chooses to buy something they need and requires only the best, a customer). The competition of other similar businesses would enable the customer to make a decision of what was best so that those not providing enough quality for a fair price would have to improve their game.

5. Advertisement and screen technology has utilized neuroscience, psychological, and biological knowledge to manipulate the people (known in the economic lens as "consumers"). I suggest a good reading session about hypnotism and psychology, especially the work of Darren Brown. Our brains are extremely perceptive and perception directly feeds into cognition which directly feeds into emotions and behavior, on both the conscious and the unconscious level. Human psychology/physiology is extremely socially oriented and we are most susceptible in areas that lead us toward more or less love, attention, inclusion, respect, recognition, connection, etc. Often our success in these areas dictate our levels of happiness through-out each day: In the morning, our spouse looks at us like we're beautiful and looks really glad to see us. We feel good. We spill our coffee on our good shirt and so we are going to look less presentable. We feel bad. Often we want to feel more love, attention, inclusion, respect, recognition from our own self. When I spill my coffee, my own self steps in in the place of my mother or father or boss or spouse, censoring myself before they can even see me, before my clumsiness has even appeared to the social reality, telling me "You are such a clutz. You are a mess this morning." I have a self voice that I have to please which at least filters me a bit from the rest of the people I have to please. Advertisers known all of our weaknesses, even beyond these foremost ones that I have discussed and the utilize their research in order to make their advertisements more effective. All day, every day, even if you do not watch television or go on the internet, we are receiving advertising impressions. These plant seeds in us that we want to buy things. If we do not have the money to buy things, we feel frantic, lifeless, smothered, empty, lonely, unrecognized...When you finally get the money to buy something you want, there's a sense of satisfaction that starts going away even before you actually pay the cashier! You don't actually want to enjoy that item, its abilities, textures, aesthetics...; its best attribute is that you have it.

6. Humans and money must separate. I appreciate that money is a fully liquidated asset that I can make in one time and place offering a random service and then, much later, across the country, I can use it to buy a potato. This is great. I really appreciate and enjoy many things that money has bought me. (I bought none of those things for very much money at all, might I add). But money has become a monster. A. We have very unhealthy emotional attitudes toward it that make us powerless and it powerful. B. It has no real value and can be controlled on large scales by those in power. We cannot see what life is about, its joy and meaningfulness, when we are focused on making and spending money. We cannot see what being human is about when we conduct our lives as though human better/worse were equal to money more/less.

7. Life as a human is what we are doing. It is what we all have in common and it is a beautiful thing, for lack of better words. We are alive - so many others have lived and died, some too early. So many are yet to be born. But, we are the humans that are alive, now, on this earth. If each decade were named a day of the week, many of us would only live each weekday once. Or if each decade were named a note of the octave...Life is only so long and this adds to its sweetness. We are alive and we are human. Out of the billions of living species on this one planet out of the millions of planets, we are humans. Humans have a very unique consciousness that no other animals on earth have. People have been trying to put their finger on this difference forever. The best theory I have read has been about the human imagination. We are able to simulate reality in our minds. We can imagine things that might happen in the future, across the world, in another person's mind. We can imagine things like, "if I were a king, I would..." or "they must have their feelings hurt". We have complex and long-term memory and we can create stories and symbols...We can make music and dance and theater and decorate ourselves and the world with beautiful things and plan ahead and we can be so thankful for and appreciate good things because we can imagine/remember so many ways in which it wouldn't have been so good. We can cultivate plants so that they taste better and better and prepare them in delicious ways. We can traverse water and land and we can organize ourselves in groups and harmoniously delegate tasks. And we also have the other perk that animals have as well - making babies, having family! What I am trying to say is: Living life as a human has nothing to do with money.

8. Aiming to live a money-less life is a path toward liberation. As long as we allow money to control us, we are slaves, emotionally, mentally, and physically. As soon as we realize that being poor is fun, the governmental and economic corrupt and greedy 1% do not have clout over us. Our lives are untouchable by them. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out historically that money developed in the way that it has because it made the citizens more controllable to the centralized governments. I am not against government or against governments having control. I think leadership groups are necessary for a harmonious society and I also agree with the ideals of democracy - that all people should have venues for their voice to be heard all the way into the smallest inner group. (I do not say higher-ups because it is not healthy to think hierarchically or vertically - people live on earth and its surface is horizontal). This is much easier/effectively/efficiently done, for obvious reasons, when the small inner circle is physically more accessible to the larger surrounding circles of the community/nation. In terms of governmental control, healthy societies have engrained, ground-level, threads of morality and mutual respect that make it so that no one wants to or needs to steal, lie, cheat, or lash out in irreparable wrath such as with arson, murder, and rape. It is important to acknowledge and discuss how humans have killed and raided each other by organized groups in traditional ways for our whole history, meaning that this may be a behavior we have to allow into our identity, much in the way we also kill animals and plants - see later. The struggles of a person would be observed by their community and they would be given the healing and attention they needed to re-balance. Mental disease was far less frequent (it is a symptom of our culture) and physical disease was only caused by injury, parasitic viruses, bacteria, or fungi, remedies for which every individual knew of. Today, we have created a culture that creates sickness and disease. This is because our culture is based on the seven sins whose enabler is money. A government does not need to control misbehavior when there is no misbehavior because everybody is happy and healthy. This is how primitive societies lived. They had no money.

9. I learned a lot from the Butoh artist Akira Kasai who performed a piece called Social Blood during the most active time of the Occupy Wall Street movement, not far away from Zuccotti Square, at the venue of DNA (Dance New Amsterdam). What one learns from watching Butoh is difficult to put into words, but I will describe the most garish and clear part of his performance: He stripped naked, changed into a glittery outfit, and began, in a way, pumping his chest, and throwing fake printed money with his own face on them frantically all over the room. When the lights came up after the performance, everyone picked up the fake money to look closer: Each paper green was 1,000,000,000 units of social blood.

Money Shmoney

Introduction