It's this basic realization that pushed Zen monk Ryōkan to exclaim “Alone with one robe, one bowl—the life of a Zen monk is truly the most free!”
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In another occasion, being the funny guy that he was, Ryōkan offered his clothes to a thief who had come to rob him but found nothing valuable to steal. After the thief left, Ryōkan sat naked, staring at the full moon. Feeling sorry for the thief, trapped as he was to live and die for material gain, Ryōkan commented, “Poor fellow. I wish I could give him this beautiful moon.”
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This same theme echoes across time and space, among religious figures as much as philosophers. We find it in Diogenes (“To own nothing is the beginning of happiness”
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), Heraclitus (“May you have plenty of wealth, you men of Ephesus, in order that you may be punished for your evil ways”
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), Thoreau (“the laboring man . . . has no time to be anything but a machine. . . . Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.”
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), and plenty others.
Why are all these guys so vehemently opposed to seeking wealth? What's wrong with good old-fashioned cash? Jesus, Buddha, and Thoreau all considered attachment to material goods as the doorway to self-inflicted pain. According to them, the thirst for wealth is never fulfilled. It breeds dissatisfaction. The more you earn, the more you want. In true addict fashion, you constantly crave more and can never have enough to be able to relax and enjoy life. Once hooked on this drug, people become the slaves of their possessions and get trapped in a struggle that will never end.
This is why Jesus, Buddha, and many other famous figures in the history of religions embraced voluntary poverty: none of them wanted to trade the time and energy needed to make money. Quite ironic, considering that many of their followers despair of never finding happiness unless they achieve a certain level of material wealth.
The profit-seeking, money-dreaming capitalist in you needs not to worry, though. Despite religion's nearly unanimous opposition to striving after wealth, some religions have reinvented themselves to justify it—and in some cases even glorify it.
Christianity offers the most dramatic example of this. In a perfect case of hypocrisy, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church officially condemned greed for centuries while amassing huge fortunes at the same time. But as sociologist Max Weber famously pointed out, it was only with the development of certain branches of Protestantism that vast numbers of Christians found a way to openly justify having both God and gold.
According to Protestants, a virtuous existence in no way guarantees an admission ticket to heaven. Their gloomy outlook on life held that human beings are horrible sinners undeserving of salvation, and only through faith and divine grace can anyone get their unworthy ass into Paradise. This means that no one could ever be sure of being saved. Since self-esteem boosting seminars were not available back then, early Protestants found relief from their anxieties in the idea that success in the world was a sign of divine favor.
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God intervenes in human affairs, they reasoned, so achieving success means being the recipient of God's blessing. Private property, as Martin Luther
pointed out, is what separates humans from beasts, so the more of it you have, the more advanced you are.
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If you are poor, on the other hand, it's because you are barely better than animals, and God probably hates your guts. The pursuit of wealth, then, became valuable not for its own sake but in order to prove one's standing in God's eyes. The door for the accumulation of wealth without any sense of guilt was finally open.
This marriage between Christianity and capitalism continues to be celebrated today by countless preachers arguing that God wants good Christians to be rich and successful. Fundamentalist leader Rod Parsley, for example, regularly condemns laws limiting unchecked capitalism, and famously stated, “one of the first reasons for poverty is a lack of knowledge of God and His Word.”
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Others, such as Reverend Robert Schuller, are even more blunt: “You have a God-ordained right to be wealthy. You're a steward of the goods, the golds, the gifts that God has allowed to come into your hands. Having riches is no sin, wealth is no crime. Christ did not praise poverty. The profit motive is not necessarily unchristian.”
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Needless to say, this message has been enthusiastically received.
As these examples demonstrate, it turns out that if you push hard enough, the camel can go through the eye of the needle after all. If you ever wanted proof that most people make up their own religions as they go, the Christian contortionists bending the Bible to say what they want it to say offer it to you on a golden plate. I can think of good arguments to defend both the accumulation of wealth as well as Jesus' radical critique of it. I have no problem with people choosing to be Christian
or
capitalists; but embracing both at the same time while claiming to follow the Bible literally is only possible if you shamelessly edit scriptures to justify your own self-interest.
Armed with some very strong opinions that exist out there about wealth, it's now my turn to tackle this issue. The message broadcasted by Lao Tzu, Buddha, and Jesus certainly resonates with me. The line between moneymaking as a priority and greed is sometimes a very fine one. My own experience tells me this. Every time I have focused my attention on the dollar sign, I have felt this insatiable hunger growing in me. It's not that I think there is anything morally wrong with wanting a more comfortable living, but I just don't like this feeling of longing. I don't think it's a coincidence that I tend to be more interested in money anytime my self-esteem is on a leave of absence. It's as if I'm trying to make myself feel better by looking at how much I've made: pride in oneself based on a number in my bank account. In the far more numerous occasions when I'm in a good mood, money is no more than a passing thought.
When European explorers first made contact with the Ojibwa tribe, they were often warned against the Windigo, a human turned demon who stalked the woods and fed on human blood. The Windigo's passion for cannibalism, however, wasn't the worst part of it. What could be worse than a flesh-eating demon? Every time the Windigo ate someone, it would grow in size so that it could never get full. Its appetite only increased by eating. For this reason, Windigos would never rest. Always hungry, always on the prowl, they were constantly looking for new victims to consume in a cycle without end.
Not finding any evidence for the existence of the Windigo, Europeans laughed it off as some savage superstition. Big mistake. They were the ones who were blind to reality. Windigos are all around—they were just too blind to see it. A Windigo is anyone who gives in
to that urge to consume in order to fill a void that can never be filled: compulsive consumption without enjoyment. That Windigo drive is what today is pushing us to devour the very planet we live on. It pushes us to devour animals, trees, the earth, resources, communities, other people, and, in an act of self-cannibalism, our own time and energy. But all of this is to no avail because, in classic Windigo fashion, the hunger is never satisfied. Give us more money, more wealth, bigger houses, bigger cars; just give us more food to feed the beast.
The consequences of letting this hungry monster run loose are for everyone to see. Centuries of chasing profits have poisoned the very system we depend on for living. In an effort to convert everything into a marketable resource, we have gone after the environment with a giant fork and knife, overconsuming air, water, and the very earth we stand on.
Despite all the lip service we pay to them, community, friendship, family, and social life are usually sacrificed next to feed the monster. There are only twenty-four hours in a day, so inevitably the more time you dedicate to work and money, the less time you have for community and friendship.
Nowhere is this contrast of values clearer than in an obscure piece of legislation passed by the US government in 1887 in an attempt to “civilize” American Indian peoples. The Dawes Act basically required native tribes to divide up reservation land into parcels of private property instead of owning it communally. Senator Henry Dawes delivered the rationale for this:
The head chief told us that there was not a family in that whole nation [Cherokee] that had not a home of its own. There was not a pauper in that nation, and the nation did not owe a dollar. . . . Yet the defect of the system was apparent. They have
got as far as they can go, because they own their land in common. . . . There is no enterprise to make your home any better than that of your neighbor's. There is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilization.
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I must have missed an important day in school as a kid, because I was taught that selfishness is not a very good thing. When did being selfish suddenly turn into a foundational point of civilization? What the hell was Dawes talking about?
His ideas actually flowed directly from the theories of Adam Smith, one of the godfathers of capitalism. Smith argued that it is human nature to accumulate wealth, so any culture that does not make the accumulation of wealth a top priority is uncivilized, and not fully human.
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The time you spend with family and friends is time taken away from the business of making money. So forget about those fuzzy things, and focus instead on working hard to have a bigger house than your neighbor. This, according to Smith, Dawes, and their disciples, is what life is all about.
Faithfully following in their footsteps, plenty of people today dedicate only slivers of time to cultivating friendships, since they are too busy offering the bulk of their energies to the altar of work. Many pop out babies just out of habit, for the sake of patting themselves on the back for having passed their genes to the next generation, but they'll spend very little time building a relationship with their children. Let school, babysitters, and TV raise them. Work, after all, comes first.
But the environment and our social lives are not the only victims in our quest for money. We usually are our own first casualty. I'm always reminded of this when I think of a conversation I had when I was a student at UCLA. Had I been honest with myself, I would have had to admit that the woman I was chatting with gave me a
really bad vibe. Something about her didn't feel right. But she was ridiculously hot, so being honest with myself didn't seem that important at the moment. I tried really hard to silence the annoying little voice warning me of the very nasty energy surrounding this woman. Being physiologically incapable of small talk, I asked her pointed, personal questions to cut the bullshit and get a sense of who she was. At some point in the conversation, she said “I don't have time to figure out what makes me happy. I just want to make money.”
Damn. I don't care how hot you are, no one looks good enough for me to put up with this. A twenty-something woman finishing college tells me she has no time to figure out what makes her happy. When does she think she'll ever have the time? When she starts working forty, fifty, or sixty hours a week, for fifty weeks every year, over the next four decades? Before she knows it, years will fly by, and she'll never find out what she likes, or how to make herself happy. She'll live someone else's life, and then she'll be food for the worms.
I have nothing against money. If you, dear reader, feel like buying twenty million copies of this book, I won't protest—I promise. I have no moral objection to buying stuff. What disturbs me is the very dangerous trade required in order to make money. The price tag is our time and energy, and there's only so much of those I want to dedicate to chasing wealth.
The trap the hot-but-annoying woman was bound to fall into is the most typical of vicious circles. You are not happy and don't know how to find happiness, so you work like a dog in hopes that the newly found wealth will allow you to afford whatever fun thing you want to do or own. But the problem is that soon enough you'll work so much you won't have the time or energy to find out what makes you happy. So what to do at this point? Just go out and buy
yourself something pretty to give you temporary comfort, and bring a little color to your otherwise miserable life. And this is where your problem becomes even bigger, because spending a bundle of cash means you now have to head back to work in order to make more money to continue the cycle of consumption. Material goods become a painkiller to dull the edges, a consolation prize in place of a real, fulfilling life. Why do so many people willingly jump headfirst into this trap? Because running after short-term gain is much easier than creating something beautiful with your life. It doesn't require any talent, and, like any good drug, it dazes you enough to make existence bearable.
When I look around me, I see overconsumption as a way of life. Spending, spending, and spending some more is the name of the game.
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Money junkies are everywhere I turn. Despite their anti-drug rhetoric, most of humanity is divided into pushers and addicts, so I remind myself daily to do my best not to join their ranks. My approach to life tells me that any work that doesn't bring joy is self-imposed slavery. It may be very well-paid slavery; it may be the kind of slavery that makes you famous and admired by other slaves; but it is slavery nonetheless. When you do something you like, making money is a by-product. If I can't make a living doing what I love, and necessity dictates I absolutely have to do slave labor, I'll try to get away with doing as little of that as I possibly can. I'll trade just enough time and energy to provide for basic needs—but not an ounce more.
As much as I agree with Jesus and Buddha that wealth is one of the most dangerous drugs in the world, I am not one to glorify poverty,
and I don't find anything particularly spiritual in it. Quite a few people who share my views regarding work and consumption come to the conclusion that poor people are somewhat nobler than the rich because they are uncorrupted by an obsession with wealth. If there were a prize for taking a good premise and turning it to crap, this idea would be a promising contender.