Money is the root of all evil?

Or is it?

What is money?  Bits of metallic coin? Pieces of printed paper? Numbers on your bank account statement? Stocks? Bonds?  Bits and Bytes stored in a vast array of computer systems worldwide?  Trillions and Trillions of dollars represented in these and other forms?

Let us mentally sum up all of this money worldwide and put it in some immense imaginary vault somewhere on earth.  Can you imagine how immense this vault would be?  What the value of its content would be?  Then remove humans from the equation.  The vault would still be immense but its value zero.

Without humans money is not worth anything.  Money (or Gold, Diamonds, etc. for that matter) has no intrinsic value.  It only has the value we humans give it.  Yet money plays a powerful role in our human world.  Recently we have seen how CEOs of global organizations because of greed and lust for wealth and power brought not just their companies but the global economy to distress.  The source of this evil is greed among the affluent particularly in the most affluent countries.

Then there is Somalia, Afghanistan, the North West Frontier Provinces of Pakistan and other areas on earth where money or rather lack of money poses an equal if not greater problem.  Illiteracy and ignorance are a direct product of poverty. Intelligence, creativity, resourcefulness, courage, and other qualities are not.  More than others the pirates of Somalia clearly demonstrate this principle. So do the insurgents in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the rest of the world.  Clearly these people are all intelligent, creative and courageous. What they do not have is education and sound knowledge.  There are those who exploit the ignorance, intelligence, creativity and courageousness of these poor people to advance their lust for money and power.

Why do these people both in affluent countries and poor countries have this lust for money and power?  It is because we average human beings encourage them to by unconditionally valueing money and power.  We associate the value of a person with their bank balance and position.  We do not really differentiate between wealthy people.  We value them by their bank balance regardless of whether they amassed their wealth by legal or illegal means.  Likewise we associate the value of a person by their power - regardless of how they gained it.

The root of all evil is not money.  It is the human lust for wealth and power.  We, average people, have the choice of either continuing to fuel this lust by giving it unconditional support or discontinue it by giving conditional embrace: (1) Morally how did one amass their wealth and (2) What is being done with this wealth, hoarding it or sharing it with the needy?

Simply put if we average humans can value other people by what they do to elevate other people rather than what they do to elevate themselves that can turn the tide where money can stop being the root of evil but rather a tool for us to contribute according to our means to make this world a better place for all of us.

Most of us spend most of our time, our thoughts, on how we can advance ourselves.  This world will be a better place if we can spend some of our time and thoughts on helping others to truly make our world a better place.

I hope you like this article and if you wish to see my other thoughts I invite you to visit my blog at http://www.weonepeople.com

Comments

[bpinto]

I have read through all your previous posts and I really like them. You are thoughtful, but more importantly those thoughts are turned towards hope for a brighter future. Keep blogging - our salvation lies in positive ideas like your own.