The Rabid desire for more fake fiat bucks, endless amounts of fake wealth…the great illusion
I see so many toil endlessly for money. And though I can appreciate the desire for money and having money – for it can buy freedom from necessity, I cannot understand the endless grubbing for it. If someone has a million they want 2. If someone has a billion they want another. I heard Rick Rule say recently that he and his wife can live the rest of their lives in comfort, never having to sweat again. They have more money than they need. Then he said, “I want more.”
And I thought, what a fool. Doesn’t he know that life is about “spiritual enlargement and enrichment” as Nock said? “Is the thing made to tend toward the enrichment and deepening of the spiritual life of man? If so, they are good. If not, they will be bad.”
If you have 10 million fake fiat bucks and you work tirelessly for another million does that tend toward the enrichment and deepening of your spiritual life? Of course not. And yet these are the people put on display to be like. These are the masters of industry. Society teaches that every good boy should grow up to be rich like Rick Rule. Rich Rule is certainly a successful man in the world of money, but in the end, money doesn’t matter. The growth of your spirit, the goodness of your soul. These matter. Did you love your brothers and sisters? Did you build them up? Did you do everything you could to live for Christ, to get to Heaven and to get all those around you into Heaven? This is what matters.
Thus America was set up – for the “aquisition and distribution of money” as Nock said. Though wealth itself is a good, the endless desire for more is not, and only shows the shallowness of men who forever scramble for more. For there is nothing else to them. They know nothing else – not art, not music, not beauty, not love. Just a hole which is only happy when money is being fed into it.
I remember reading that Warren Buffett is going to give all his money away when he dies, give it “back to America” he said. And I couldn’t help but think, here is one of the richest men in the world, who spent his entire life in pursuit of dollars, and collared quite a few of them and at the end of his life his life’s work will be broadcast back into the field. What a life! To work for something and then, when it is done, it is destroyed. Better I think to work on that which stays after you’ve left and that which goes with you.
Like Thoreau said: “The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.”