What Does Money Have To Do With Freedom?
January 23, 2012
I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits.
[From Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Norway, 1964]
By John Bloom
Freedom is such a challenging word. It stands for a political view encompassing civil liberty; it stands in for the aspiration of the human spirit. What freedom means to me is personal. It informs how I go about the day as an individual and make my decisions, and it governs my communications and relationships as first principle—a capacity to respect the inner freedom of others even as I practice my own. Understanding what freedom means to others, as a right bestowed or limited by the state, as democratic practice, or as an inwardly determined guide to being, is fundamental to healthy relationships.
Given this brief background, I was bothered by a thought written by Harold Bloom [no relation], the esteemed author, in a recent New York Times article entitled, “Will This Election Be the Mormon Breakthrough?” [November 13, 2011, Sunday Review p.6] He wrote: “Obsessed by a freedom we identify with money, we tolerate plutocracy as if it could someday be our own ecstatic solitude.” If you have read the sentence a time or two, perhaps you are with me in my disturbance. Do we identify money with freedom? Is tolerance even a fair way to characterize our feelings about being ruled by the wealthy? And do we tolerate it because each of us secretly desires or imagines we could one day be wealthy enough to join the ruling class? I cannot think that participants and supporters of Occupy Wall Street share this implied aspiration. In fairness to Harold Bloom, the next sentence in the article links the experience of freedom with religious solitude. While it seemed to me either a non-sequitur or a leap based on unspoken assumptions, the swift shift is a microcosmic example of the muddled or manipulated boundary between politics and spirit. That blurring has allowed the political to pollute the domain of the spirit, and for spirit (or religion) to be used in the name of the political. Inserting money only further complicates the mix.
How can we possibly identify money with freedom, really? Money is an emanation of the material world moved by the inner forces of need and intention. While it has many and varied forms, money is a function, not a thing; money’s meaning is embedded in its service to economic life, that is to say as it supports the circulation of goods and services. When we treat it as a thing and tie our self-worth and identity to how much we have of it, we add to the complex that creates and “tolerates plutocracy,” and part of the complexity that sustains it. Money is no more a commodity than freedom. One cannot have money and be free of anyone else, because money in its true function holds or marks a value that is created through our economic interdependence. Freedom serves an important role in relation to economic life but should not be mistaken as an outcome of it.
Before exploring money further, I would like to return to the boundary between freedom as it pertains to political life and the freedom associated with solitude. The democratic principle of freedom, one person one vote, is a system of governance that is the result of community agreement—such as a constitution. Democracy is essentially a non-hierarchical form in that each member of the community is an equal of the others. And, it requires an “informed citizenry” to function effectively. What exactly does this mean? It is the responsibility of each individual member of the citizenry to engage in educating him or herself, to develop capacities of discernment, to seek insight into the matters at hand in order to effectively contribute to the democratic process. It also assumes that every member of the community has the capacity, if not the desire, for self-development. This responsibility for self-development, and how each of us designs that process for him or herself, what each of us wants to undertake and define as accomplishment is the evolution of individuality and the locus of spiritual freedom. This, I believe, is what Dr. King was referring to as “freedom for their spirits.”
To squelch this inner freedom, to organize a society in such a way that some individuals matter more than others, especially in the body politic, translates into laming that society’s economic well-being. What self-governed inner freedom provides the economy is people’s fresh ideas and insights that can then be brought into service to the community as a way to earn a living. Each individual has a need for right livelihood to use the Buddhist phrase. It seems that this human capacity, left free, is an infinitely renewable resource for reinventing the economy, governance, and culture. But it requires trust in others and sharing of power, an education that brings us together rather than driving us ever further apart in the division of labor, and a sense that there is something more than the material world at stake. What we have not yet resolved is how to organize our society to recognize and support such a clarity of function and principle. But Dr. King certainly had the audacity to believe that we could and can. Our interdependent existence depends on it.
John Bloom is Senior Director, Organizational Culture at RSF Social Finance.
- Published by Jillian McCoy
- Categories: Blog, Economy, Money
As usual John, you throw down the gauntlet, providing a provocative and challenging assessment for us to reflect on. In part I am reminded of the “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” of Animal Farm fame.
In Australia we have the interesting social and political landscape unfolding where we the community is being weaned off a very long history of government intervention onto a smaller government user-pays strategy. This has the effect of lowering taxes however we haven’t as yet developed the giving or philanthropic ethos long evident in the United States especially among the wealthy.
In recent months Commonwealth Government attempts to apply a mining tax to super profits in a time of high demand and massive profits, has been met by enormous advertising campaigns by the mining industry (plutocracy??) decrying such a tax. Similar challenges to the revenue stream of poker machine operators who leave a trail of wreckage in the families of addicts have seen the same despite the committed and highly dedicated efforts of many politicians to legislate to prevent excesses. It seems there is a fine line between social cost and individual freedom. Where does the boundary occur between the freedom to pursue a line of business that has deleterious effects on some consumers versus the right of the community to ensure the care and safety of its members?
It is my view that when the political process lacks “informed citizenry” we slide unwittingly into government for the deepest wallets and loudest voices. In my view the greatest part of Barrack Obama’s ascendency was the support given in $20 donations by squillions of Americans because they were standing up and reasserting their voices in the political process.
Comment by Wendy McMahon — January 28, 2012 @ 5:34 pm
My thought is that: with money you can get freedom however, with more money you cannot get it
Thanks for the article.
Comment by Mr.Ven — February 13, 2012 @ 5:48 am
Thanks John, for bringing to proper light the concept of “freedom”, so much talked about but so little understood in an age where the economic element largely controls and determines the political and cultural life of humanity. It seems that we have come to mistakenly associate freedom with money (money in this case as a store of value rather than a medium of exchange). If we can accumulate and stock pile enough of it, we think that we will be free of toil and want, and free to pursue what brings us pleasure- though certainly none of the these things will bring us true freedom in and of themselves. Yet, it seems to me that for the majority of persons, our oppressive economic system mitigates against and squelches freedom in our cultural and spiritual life to a large extent. We have an education system more interested in churning out obedient, productive workers for this or that industry than creating free thinkers, and that puts students into debt bondage from the moment they take their first job. We have mass marketing and pop-culture influences programming people from a young age with so much consumer propaganda, mental noise, and moral debauchery that it is increasing difficult to sort out what thoughts and desires are our own, versus what has been manufactured. And for the vast majority of people, who are forced to rent the lions share of their time to profit driven corporations in order to survive in hostile economic conditions increasingly stacked against them, there is not the time to become free spirits, let alone to engage in a meaningful civic and community life. Therefore, it seems true that if we are to begin to develop within ourselves true freedom in our thinking, feeling and willing, that we must somehow find the means to extract ourselves from the influences of indoctrinating education, mesmerizing mass media, and debauching pop-culture; and while still earning enough for our daily upkeep, begin to search within ourselves for the link with that one thing that will make us truly free beings- our Self. As a great German thinker has said, “That man alone is free who in every moment of his life is able to obey only himself.”
Comment by Humaniterrian — March 1, 2012 @ 1:17 am
Dear John,
i have been meaning to write back to you about your article and also say again how helpful you have been in helping me clarify my thinking on how to present 3-fold in both written and oral form. I am doing a teach-in on Thursday at the Arlene Francis Center in Santa Rosa that will be my first attempt to put Move to Amend and the attempt to amend the constitution to establish that “Money is not Speech” and “Corporations are not people” into the larger context of social organization on a 3-fold basis.
I love the way you relate the “economic” value of cultural freedom in terms of how this is the chief ingredient in true innovation and progress in economic activity.
I also love that you relate this to Dr. King. I think it is crucial to find ways to present ideas in a more contemporary way that is embedded in our culture. I am using The Hammer Song (Pete Seeger and Lee Hayes, 1949) as the framing for my talk…
I hope to see you soon and think of you often and fondly.
In love and freedom,
abraham entin
Comment by Abraham Entin — March 6, 2012 @ 1:11 pm