Man's Fate and God's Choice by Bhimeswara Challa (feel good fiction books .txt) 📕

God.” (Proverbs, 30:8-9)242

Someone quipped that to know what God thinks of money, look at those to whom he has given money! Well, it is hard to tell. And it was not always so. Aristotle said: “Money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term ‘interest’, which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth, this is the most

unnatural.”243 And Voltaire said: “When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion.”244 Few can match the opulence of our God-men, and very few are more ostentatiously religious than the rich. The philosopher Jacob Needleman, author of the book

The New Religions (1970), believes that our obsession with money and compulsion for

material wealth undercut personal authenticity. Money has changed the way one human

241 P.D. Sharma. Immortal Quotations and Proverbs. 2003. Navneet Publications. Mumbai, India. p.88.

242 Cited in: Nigel Goh. Money, Sex and Power. Eagles VantagePoint. Accessed at: http://www.vantagepoint.com.sg/Money_Goh_2008.html

243 Cited in: Philosophy Resource Center, George J. Irbe’s Favorite Quotes from Aristotle on Selected Topics. Education and Living. The Radical Academy. Accessed at: http://www.radicalacademy.com/philosophicalquotations33.htm

244 Voltaire. ThinkExist.com. Voltaire Quotes. Accessed at: http://thinkexist.com/quotation/when_its_a_question_of_money-everybody_is_of_the/8412.html

relates to another, and threatens to turn man into a virtual Homo economicus. Man the producer/consumer is gradually losing his ‘capacity for communion’ with his neighbors. A segregated fellow, insulated from community, corrupted by his concupiscence for material wealth. In a 2006 study, researchers at the Florida State University wrote: “As countries and cultures developed, money may have allowed people to acquire goods and services that enabled the pursuit of cherished goals, which in turn diminished reliance on friends and

family.”245 Money gives power and highlights inequalities. If man is the measure of everything, then money is the measure of man. Deborah Price, author of the book Money Magic (2003) says that “making, keeping, and enjoying money isn’t just about investments, salaries, inheritances, or dividends… It’s also about the games people play around money and their character type in relation to it”246. According to Price, “Just about every decision we make, and much of our personality, is formed in some way, shape or form by our beliefs

around money.”247 It equals sex as a source of the greatest joy, it equals power as an aphrodisiac, and it equals death as a source of the highest anxiety. The paradox is that, while a century or two ago, man was secretive about sex and more open about money, people today openly proclaim their sexual preferences and peccadilloes, but are silent about their wealth.

While sexual satiation has its biological limitations, the desire for money is limitless.

Money’s mesmerizing effect on the human mind is mind boggling, and neither reason nor psychoanalysis can adequately explain it. It is irrational and, in fact, ought to be an affront to intelligence; yet we are willing slaves. The human obsession with riches far exceeds the human need for artha (wealth) and kama (worldly gain). And it often collides with dharma or righteousness. In its pursuit, man brushes aside every other norm or need, restraint or constraint. It is an all-consuming passion, respects no relationship, and is capable of unleashing the darkest human instincts. No crime, fratricide, matricide, or patricide is exempt from its tentacles. No amount is too small to steal or kill for. The more one has it, the more he hungers for it. The greed for money overshadows every other greed. The irony is that money defeats the very purpose of having it; it gives neither security nor satisfaction, though the fact makes no dent in man’s obsession. A moral man has to be liberated from the vice-like hold of wealth on him; but having money is not immoral. In fact, the Upanishads recognize money, artha, as one of the legitimate and righteous aspirations of man. Excessive money leads to obscene opulence, ostentatious lifestyle, reckless attitude and to a sense of being powerful and privileged.

Many hurdles impede man’s spiritual progress, and one of the most formidable is the intoxicating incursion of money and materialism into the deepest layers of human consciousness. Can we turn them around and make them stepping stones to human progress? Some think it is possible. Jacob Needleman, for example believes that our long disinclination to grasp the emotional and spiritual effects of money on us lies at the heart of why we have come to know the price of everything, and the value of nothing, and that it could lead us to

245 Cited in: Jill Elish. The Florida State University News. Two Sides of the Same Coin: Money Spurs Changes for Better and Worse. Accessed at: http://www.fsu.edu/news/2006/11/20/two.sides/

246 Cited in: Money Magic. New World Library. Accessed at: http://www.newworldlibrary.com/BooksProducts/ProductDetails/tabid/64/SKU/12449/Default.aspx

247 Cited in: Frances Lefkowitz. Money Changes Everything: Exploring Your Attitudes Towards Money Can be the First Step in Making Personal and Global Transformations. CBS MoneyWatch.com. September 2004. Accessed at: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0NAH/is_8_34/ai_n6191102/

self-knowledge and turn out to be ‘a tool for breaking out’ of our mental prison.248 It is his thesis that in our time the principle of personal gain is embodied in the quest for money and that our obsession with money and compulsion for material wealth undercut personal integrity. Man has been called a ‘moral animal,’ ‘thinking animal,’ and ‘social animal’. The presumption is that these are the attributes that animals do not have. Above all, man is an ‘economic animal’ or ‘Homo economicus.’ John Stuart Mill defined him as “a being who desires to possess wealth, and who is capable of judging of the comparative efficacy of means

for obtaining that end”249. What has been called historical materialism or, in the words of Karl Marx, materialist conception of history, proposes that “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social being determines their consciousness.”250 In this view, it is in man’s economic incarnation that he becomes a productive person. It is how

humans ‘make the means to live’ that shape their personalities and predispositions. It is the economic processes that delineate the Man--Nature relationship. Making money, saving money and spending money, often all at the same time, become the primary passion and preoccupation. Man’s relationship with others is based primarily on their economic use to him, commodities that exist for his economic gain. It is to a large extent, this single-minded pursuit of his economic agenda that has dwarfed his spiritual persona.

Obviously, human society being far more complex than that of the other species and our wants being almost limitless and multiple, some kind of money and some sort of economy are essential to bring order, and for making the human whole more than the sum of its parts. The question is really not if we need an economic life, but of what kind. The growing importance of the economic aspect of human life, and the attendant economic disparities and inequities within and among societies, raise moral questions. How should a person ‘make a living’? How much of it can he use for his needs and wants? What is his obligation to help those less fortunate, who are unable to earn enough to lead a life of bare dignity? And how should he channel his help? Is a person morally entitled to spend as he likes so long as he conforms to the law of the land? How does one become eligible for the aid of other people or of the State? Is a person morally righteous or evil if he earns his wealth legally but does not help others, or does not help them proportionately? How does one morally view a person who illegally and immorally makes millions and spends much of it on charity? Given the so-called triumph of capitalism over socialism in the world and the thirst for spiritualism the world over, these are issues that deserve serious introspection. The American industrialist-philanthropist John D. Rockefeller said “When a man has accumulated a sum of money within the law, that is to say, in the legally correct way, the people no longer

have any right to share in the earnings resulting from the accumulation.”251 The ‘philosophy’ is, what I do with what I earn, accumulate and how I spend, if I am law abiding, is between me and my conscience. This is the refrain, not of the parasites of the society but of the

248 Cited in: Editorial Reviews. Publishers Weekly. Jacob Needleman. Money and the Meaning of Life. 1994. Accessed at: http://www.amazon.com/Money-MeaFning-Life-Jacob-Needleman/dp/0385262426

249 Cited in: Mill on Political Economy: Collected Works Vol.II. Introduction by V.W. Balden. The Forum at the Online Library of Liberty, A Project of Liberty Fund. Accessed at: http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=524&Itemid=278

250 Cited in: Karl Marx. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. 1859. Preface. Accessed at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm

251 Cited in: Inequality.Org. CEOs and Business Leaders. Accessed at: http://www.demos.org/inequality/quotes.cfm

‘honest’ and ‘honorable’; Rockefeller himself was prince among such people. That doctrine, seemingly flawless, has many loopholes: one, the law regulates only our minimal social obligation, not personal responsibility; two, there is a lot of moral space that is not covered by the State and society; and three, our conscience itself is slumbering and is corrupted by our ‘winner-takes-all’ culture.

While money is the metaphor for modern man, sex is the signature of our civilization.

We associate it with sin and shame, perhaps more than with anything else, and it is also a primary source of sensory pleasure. ‘The subject of sex’ Edward Carpenter wrote in 1896 at the beginning of his seminal work Love’s Coming of Age, ‘is difficult to deal with’. Several decades later, despite new tools and the emergence of a new scientific field, sexology, the subject has only become more complex and intractable; the fog over it has become more impenetrable. Whatever was the origin and original intent when it sprouted first, its relationship with the human is now double-faced: sex controls man, and it is also controlled by him through technology.

Human sexuality exists today in a sort of moral vacuum, a protean force and a source of pleasure and pain, agony and ecstasy, anxiety and affirmation, a reason for being, and an overpowering cause for killing. There is a battle for the future of sexuality, and how it emerges in the end, and the process leading to it, might have much to do with our own future. In our contemporary culture, people make money off sex, as well as use sex to make money. And use it as a means to acquire power, and use power as a means for sex. At the same time, extreme poverty can induce or seduce a person to trade sex for money. It is the hallmark of the affluent as well as of the extreme poor. The ‘in between’ — that is, those who do not have to sell sex to buy their basic necessities, but who need money to indulge in cosmetics and high-end consumer goods — do not make a living on sex, but use it sometimes to go higher on the social or professional ladder. The two are intertwined — ‘Sex and Money’ as they are called. According to one survey that appeared in the business magazine MarketWatch some years ago, ‘the richer you are… the better sex you have’, and that ‘the majority of men and women credit their private wealth with achieving a better sex life’. In the survey, ‘three- quarters of men cited more frequent