When people talk about money it is usually in practical terms. Money is considered to be an important issue that affects everyone. After all if you don’t have enough then it is hugely important. But money and currency is about more than paying the rent check, getting a salary and making sure that bread and food is on the table. Money is actually something that has a significant cultural effect on everyone and yet this is often not recognised.
Money is not ‘just’ money: it is associated with instincts that are part of our psyche and we have instincts to make money that have lingered since the earliest humans were alive.
Money, Money, Money!
Money effectively shapes Societies. In countries where there are adequate supplies of food, where people are not starving and the population should be relaxed and at peace with life, there is still one burning pre-occupation: money.
In countries where people have little money and there is little hope of getting enough money to live comfortably, it would be understandable if people were pre-occupied by how they can simply get together enough money to survive. But in developed countries, why are people still so pre-occupied with it?
Well the drive to acquire money is actually deep within the human psyche. In ancient times, when men were hunters and gatherers, there was a need to stockpile resources, particularly to ensure that people could survive the winter. So carcasses would be brought back to the caves and then kept, so that there was at least some kind of food to keep people going. Nuts, berries, in fact anything would be collected and stored, similar to the way that squirrels hoard their nuts for the winter.
Even in summertime people prepared for winter by eating well, building fat stores so that the fat could be burned off in winter.
At this point, humankind may not have been sophisticated and articulate, but they had the ability to think, to plan and to act strategically. As a result they were able to plan for the dark and cold winter.
In a cave where there were adequate supplies, the inhabitants would emerge in springtime, probably malnourished, but at least alive. In a cave, where little in the way of supplies had been stored, it was likely that they would not all survive. They may not have died directly from starvation, but with inadequate food supplies their immune systems would have been weakened and thus they would be less fit to be able to fight off infection.
Thus an important drive entered into the spirit of humankind, the need to make sure that we stockpiled, to ensure survival. This has translated into needing plenty of money, in fact always more money.
Historically, when people began to have enough that they could live comfortably, they began to save. Many people lived frugally and always put by some money for a rainy day. They were keen not to live outside their means and always wanted to make sure that they had savings to fall back on.
21ST Century Attitudes to Money
However, after the Second World War, there was a major shift in this type of opinion. The ravages of war shocked people, many people felt that there was no point in being thrifty and making do, after all, you may find that you aren’t around tomorrow, so why not just spend a little and enjoy life when you can?
On the outside this may seem as if it is a different attitude to stockpiling reserves. After all, if money can keep you safe and ensure that you don’t have to worry about the future then doesn’t it make sense to just stockpile money, saving as much as possible? Well this may be true, but Europe had experienced 6 years of deprivation during the war, with very few countries not affected by it. Then there was also the post war years, where austerity was commonplace and food was still rationed in many places.
The US had not experienced this kind of deprivation, but it had experienced the economic recession of the Great Depression. Overnight many people had literally lost everything they had worked so hard to acquire. They were virtually penniless as all their stocks, shares and savings simply evaporated, to be no more.
Then after the US had recovered from this, many of her men were sent to fight in Europe, a country that many had roots in, but had never actually visited. And they did not come home, they died fighting a war thousands of miles from home.
So, it doesn’t take much analysis to work out that people felt there was really no need to get lots of money stockpiled in the bank. Why not use money and enjoy life and buy things with it. After all if you have lots of material possessions, then you are going to be comfortable and be able to withstand the rigours of lean times and if food becomes in short supply, well goods can be sold and items bartered.
In many parts of the world, people grew increasingly attracted to real estate, so instead of renting, they would buy their own home and then this would be their reserve of money. If times got very bad, they would at least have somewhere to live and wouldn’t be evicted (so long as they had paid the mortgage off).
Then, if times got very, very bad, the home could be sold off and people could simply live off the capital.
And so people in developed countries started to buy their homes and then furnish them with items that were comfortable, good to look at and gave them a sense of security. But they needed one thing to be able to do all this: money!
So money became the driving force to make sure that you had a good home, financial security for the future and that you could also take care of your kids (at least for a while). Thus whilst people in developed countries may actually have enough money to survive, they usually want more.
Often people refer to this as “keeping up with the neighbors” and to some extent this is true, but it derives from the desire to make sure that people have enough to keep them going. When humans lived in caves, everyone wanted to have at least as much food stockpiled as the ‘cave next door’. Keeping up with the neighbors is just the 21st Century equivalent.
The Drive to Progress
Humans also want money, whatever their social standing, because they want to progress and develop. Again, this is an instinct that humans acquired in pre-historic times, but is still with us on some level today.
If humans did not have an innate sense of wishing or even needing to progress, then caves would still be the primary residence for humans. Because humans have the ability to think and reason, they therefore need to move forward.
When early men lived in caves, they started to develop fire and to understand the changing aspects of the seasons and what each one meant: spring with its awakening and the opportunity to plant food crops, summer where there was a period of warmth and growth, autumn, where crops could be harvested and then winter, which was cold and often dark.
Eventually humans realised that although caves were functional, if they could erect structures that they had built, then they could be warmer. They could also enclose animals to make sure they did not escape. Humans realised therefore that they could be more comfortable and this has been with us ever since.
Constantly innovations have changed Societies and the world as a whole. Even now that in developed countries, life expectancy is so high, everyone wants to live longer, to be more comfortable and to have a better quality of life. People no longer have the challenge of finding better accommodation than caves, so now energy is channelled into making money, so that life will simply be easier! This drive makes humans special and it is an acknowledgement of just how rational and developed human beings are, but also an acknowledgement of the instincts that humans have inherited, over thousands and thousands of years.
Religion and Money
Money has also entered the psyche of people through religion. In the Bible, there is an ambiguous attitude towards money, with Jesus (the pillar of the Christian faith) being betrayed by Judas for ‘30 pieces of silver’. Jesus also preached against the making of money in temples and made it very clear that it was ‘easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter heaven’.
Yet Jesus also recognised that money was needed in order to survive. The main emphasis seems to be on ‘ethical trading’ in the sense that Jesus felt that it was ok to make money, but not at someone else’s expense. Indeed in Matthew Chapters 25 and 26, a story is relayed about how someone used money wisely from the Lord by trading with the money.
Jesus also advocated that money should be given to the poor, ‘quietly and without fuss’. Yet for money to be given to the poor, it had to be raised in the first place.
Money is also mentioned in the Kuran, where it specifies acceptable ways in which money can be raised. Credit is forbidden by Allah and there are also very strict guidelines on business transactions. However, the creation of wealth is seen as a good thing, mainly because it is perceived to enable people to give more in the form of alms. The giving of alms is central to the Islamic faith, so making money is not frowned upon. Making money in the wrong way is!
Within the Old Testament money and making money is also depicted as being acceptable, as is sharing the money, but making money on the holy Day, the Shabbat, is strictly forbidden.
Other faiths in the world also address the issue of money. Most seem to view money as being something of a necessary evil, where people need money to live on, but should not raise it in unethical ways and many faiths advocate the giving of alms to the poor.
The recognition of money in a spiritual context is important, because it indicates just how important the concept of money is and how it infiltrates humans’ conscious and unconscious minds, without people even realising it.
Some psychologists state that when you dream about money, particularly losing money, you are actually dreaming about love and perhaps losing love or a fear of losing love. This shows how powerful money really is in psychological terms: in subconscious terms, we equate it with the greatest human emotion- love. So money and love are on a par in the deepest recesses of our minds!
Money and Language
Money has also entered almost every language in the world in some form or another as sayings or clichés. These sayings reflect different cultural and social attitudes towards money, many of which change and evolve over time.
The French have a wonderful saying that ‘It’s a wise man who lives with money in the bank, but only a fool would die that way’. The Jews have an old Yiddish saying that runs along the lines of ‘A penny is a lot of money: if you don’t even have a penny’. Even less developed peoples have their sayings about money. The Ashanti tribe has a saying that can be translated as ‘Money is always sharper than the sword’. This saying sums up so much about money in just the one, succinct sentence. Money can be used to betray, to buy someone’s soul or just to divide people from each other. It is indeed sharper than the sword and yet most people don’t even think about it, unless it’s in terms of just how much they are making or want to make!
Money sayings can often be quite pessimistic. The Americans use a very jaded term (now used throughout the world), which is ‘Another day, another dollar’. This sums up the dull, repetitive and boring jobs that many people do, just to make enough money to get by. Not enough money that it is worth doing the job and not enough job satisfaction that you feel you are doing the job for anything other than money! Quite depressing really.
Some sayings are quite funny. Cash cow (meaning a company or person that can be literally milked for cash) is a really evocative and descriptive terms: yet it is only two words in length!
Not all sayings are easy to understand or readily apparent. Often people in the UK talk about spending a penny, when they actually mean going to the toilet. The reference to the penny is when public toilets used to charge a penny to make use of the facilities.
‘She was caught with her fingers in the till’ means that someone was caught stealing, usually at a place of work or in an official capacity. It used to refer to shop floor workers, but is now used with regard to anyone who has defrauded an employer. It is an informal term, nevertheless, yet it is also wonderfully descriptive.
The range of sayings on the subject of money, of which there are literally thousands, demonstrate that money is a key issue for all races and tribes. People as a whole value money and so it is given a special place in every language, with its own special sayings.
Money Matters
Thus no matter how much money you have, you will probably always want just that little bit more, or sometimes, quite a lot more. Money drives us, shapes us, makes us feel more relaxed when we have it and stressed when we don’t.
Many people like to trot out the old adage that ‘Money can’t buy you happiness’ and some recent research indicates that people who are the happiest are people who are reasonably well off, but not necessarily filthy rich. This may stem from the fact that if you have enough to see you through and you have achieved more than your parents and therefore you have progressed and succeeded even in a small way, then you have fulfilled your natural drive to effect change and progress.
Then you can simply relax and enjoy life. However, if your drive to progress is a little out of balance and you are exceptionally driven, then you will always want to have more and more and more, so you can never attain any real level of contentment. So you just keep on trying to make more and more money!
Who knows the real secret to becoming content around money, but in the meantime, keep those dreams alive and realise that the desire to make money is actually one of the most natural in the world, as natural as love!