“For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.” (1 Timothy 6:10, King James Version)
This oft-quoted first century biblical verse demonstrates that money has been around for a very long time. In fact, a reference in Ecclesiastes 5:10 documents that human civilizations had struggled with the use of money about four centuries before that!
Although these texts are drawn from Judaic and Christian sources, all of humanity – regardless of faith tradition – has suffered for its use of money … and nearly 25 centuries later we still do.
Most of us have seen the good that money can do, but humanity has too often shown its dark side in its pursuit of accumulating it.
So why – in spite of the overwhelming evidence that money brings out the worst in human nature – do we continue to use it as a means to trade goods and services? Pound for pound, more harm than good has come to humanity in the name of money, but we still insist on basing our daily existence around it.
I suspect that we continue to use money more out of habit for the very simple reason that it is all we know in spite of the harm it continues to cause. This “habit” was likely established in a time predating recorded history when humans created barter-based economies, i.e., trading services and goods for the other without the use of money. This long-standing habit will be hard to break, but it needs to be broken because as far as bad habits go, it’s about the worst there is.
Experience shows that people do not like to change what’s familiar even when a familiar routine does not benefit us and it is especially true regarding our use of money. Of course, many of you are thinking: If we stop using money, what will replace it?
That is a good question.
Ultimately, why does anything need to replace it? Why can’t we just continue putting food on the table and keeping a roof over our heads while continuing to produce goods and offer services as we always have without having to demand or offer payment for those transactions? The infrastructures already exist to allow the free flow of goods; just eliminate the friction that money imposes on this flow to truly make it free in order to allow ALL of humanity to truly be and to truly exist.
It may seem like a “pie in the sky” idea, but humanity needs to give up thinking that money needs to be a part of who we are and what we do. We need to see money as the root of the majority of our problems in the world and decide that we can’t keep living this way anymore.
It may be too optimistic to think that we can eliminate our reliance on money within a generation, but the hope is that the problem is too self-evident to continue pretending that it doesn’t exist.
