Disappointing, muddled, and at points unreadable. The book, much of it word salad, becomes increasingly painful and masturbatory throughout.
The author wants to tell the reader that money isn't grubby or bad per se, that it can and should be used as an instrument of self-discovery, and that when used this way money can be a beautiful, effective and practical tool. But the author doesn't seem to want to say this and be done with it.
The reader experiences the same frustrations found in Montaigne's essays: you wish the author would consider getting to the point. Of course, when an author writes well and shares plenty of genuine insight along the way, a meandering journey to "the point" can be a pleasure. But this author is not Montaigne.
When an author writes to hear the sound of his own voice, the incentives are all wrong. The reader gets salad instead of insight. Thus a healthy practice here--with all writing in fact--is to go over everything, multiple times, omitting needless words. This is the mother of all writing tools, and using it maximizes the force and clarity of your writing. Had this author been forced to cut his word count by half, he'd have twice the book.
[Readers: please, please do not read the notes that follow.]
Notes:
Introduction: The Force of Money
1ff "If you want to take the true measure of someone, observe how he handles sex, time, and money." The author cites money as a domain that devours or confuses people. On the dearth of guidance about money in "great books" or teachings of the past. [I couldn't disagree more! You just have to look at the teachings of the past through the right mental lens. If you expect Xenophon and Epictetus to literally help you with your 401k you have other problems...] Also there's very little anywhere talking about the relationship between "the quest for money and the quest for meaning. This book's purpose is "to open this question and offer material for the task of answering it" [Any domain, money or any other, has to be something you are sincerely curious about, unfearful about, able to talk about. If you're fearful or anxious about it, or unwilling to talk about it, the domain itself--whatever it is--will hypocognize you, and you'll find yourself at some point taken advantage of. You want to make sure that no domain puts you at that kind of disadvantage.]
3ff On how money plays a powerful role in our inner and outer lives, more now than ever, and "any serious search for self knowledge and self-development requires that we study the meaning that money actually has for us." "The money factor is there, wrapped around or lodged inside everything. Think of what you want or what you dream of, for now, or next year, or for the rest of your life. It will take money, a certain definite amount." He goes on to talk about how even Utopias, religious salvation, all new ideas, everything needs to be fueled to some extent by money.
4ff Comments here on "jumping out of the system" [although the author doesn't say it quite this way]: you cannot just deal with it in a piecemeal fashion, just like a prisoner can't escape from prison by visiting the prison psychologist. The author extends the analogy in the following pages to a kind of Plato's cave-type situation where inside the prison there is a whole system that blocks you from conceptual ideas that come from outside the walls; such a message might be threatening to the institution itself, or to the people in the prison; but at the same time some "hear the message" and can be taught how to escape, as well as to help others escape; on it being a form of awakening [it kind of is just that: you need to "awaken" in the domain to manage it more mindfully, more consciously], and it is a metaphor for mankind's life on this Earth.
8ff Discussion of the self and the watcher, on how the second self doesn't care about things like money and other things that evoke so much desire and anxiety in one's other/false self.
11 "Why do we spend our precious psychic energy on creating better cells in our prison rather than seeking to escape?" [The reader may interpret this to mean literally getting off the plantation of W-2 wage slavery, but also to mean freeing yourself from self-limiting thinking about money and wealth.]
12ff The author refers back to the businessman thinker he quotes at the beginning of the book, he was once was on a panel of scholars, philosophers and religious leaders who were decrying "the rich" as greedy, and selfish, as well as criticizing the American economic system, etc., and this guy said to the rest of the panel, "Is there a way of looking at money so that it is a unifying factor, or is money only a problem? .. "it seems very odd, but even in the spiritual realm, money really does seem to help." And he goes on to a discussion of truly seeing our tendencies: how we are vulnerable to the material power of money at all levels, and that we have to be honest about this [This comment strikes me as very Krishnamurtian: it's all about seeing the problem in a deeper way, not settling for a cursory, cognitively easy way (e.g.: "the rich are bad/the system is bad") view here!] Also it's interesting to see here that no one on this panel really asked him to flush out what he was talking about, the conversation just moved on to other things. [Nobody wants to hear ideas that challenge their intrinsic views or paradigms, it's easier to just move on and go back to what you were already saying or thinking.] The author also quotes this man from an essay he wrote for a journal (which was rejected for lacking "the requisite scholarly apparatus", heh), writing, "it may be necessary to have mastered the money game before one can see with certainty that the power of money over the human mind is limited and that there are things money cannot buy." [In other way to say this is you have to beat the game before you can transcend the game.]
16 The author articulates the purpose of this book in a poorly-written paragraph here, but perhaps one way to tighten into a sentence would be to say "the purpose of this book is to find the precise place of money at the heart of our search to become what we are meant to be."
Part I: The Affluent Society and the Impoverished Soul
Chapter 1: "The Richest and Most Powerful Nation on Earth"
19ff The author as a schoolboy, attempting to process the idea of the United States being a rich and powerful nation, he wonders how a whole nation can be "rich" when he was not rich, his family was not rich and in fact they barely had enough money for the necessities of life; most of the people he knew were not only not rich but not even comfortable.
21 The author as a child has a sort of flash of insight about his friend who has all the toys he wants; he's "rich," but he's also a sad prince on some level; this experience sat with him for years afterwards; on how in his family money was something his family desperately needed; money broke his father's spirit again and again, and as well as his own; yet he couldn't help noticing that his friend had everything he wanted, but it was not what he wanted!
22ff The author concludes that growing up in a wealthy country means that "ours is a society that has given material wealth first priority in our common life. As I study the history of different cultures, I began to realize what was for me an astonishing fact: not every civilization has wanted what ours has wanted!" On the idea that in our society we want this wealth more than we want anything else: a misordering of priorities that we need to find a way back from; that this priority has captured and surrounded other pursuits. On studying and understanding this problem of our relationship to money and in order to do so adapting a certain attitude toward the range of problems; also on the problem of "trying to solve the problem before we have really understood it and seen it as a whole." [This is a good example of ludic fallacy/midwit problem that shows up whenever a domain requires the mind to not quickly resolve a problem; instead you have to keep your mind silent, so it can hold various paradoxes and conflicting thoughts in place at the same time; only then can you really feel around the contours of a complex domain like this.]
Chapter 2: The New Poverty
25 The author cites people he knows who are successful professionals, talented, mature, living in beautiful homes, who are doing well, but all seem to be going through difficult periods, a rough time, a bad time: these people were all like his childhood friend with all the toys.
27ff On the dangers and evils of our desires if we fuel them or if we allow them to define us; on John Kenneth Galbraith and his book The Affluent Society and the idea of a society built on the creation of desire, a consumer goods-driven economy; such that we as individuals cultivate our own desires and then go to the marketplace to quench them. Also on the paradox that because we're spending all of our time busily having and quenching our desires, all the inventions and technologies of modernity just cause us to have even less time. [This of course is seen in both Jevon's Paradox and Parkinson's Law.]
30 Interesting comment here where the author argues that because we're so "time poor" our lives are literally growing shorter and shorter, despite medical science prolonging lifespans.
30ff The author is "haunted" by the daily life of Donald Trump as described in his book The Art of the Deal. He writes that there's a Donald Trump inside of all of us who likes to be occupied with important business, important people, etc. [Interestingly I take the quote he shares from Trump's book differently: I read it as more like Trump enjoys his work to the point where it doesn't actually feel like work, in the Warren Buffett "tap dancing to work" sense: that you enjoy both of rhythm and the intellectual and competitive aspects of your work to the point where you would do it anyway. I think this is the sort of thing that we all seek, even though it may not be the precise form of work Buffett--or Trump, or whoever--does.] The author is disturbed by his apparent joy of being busy and also that he in part of himself envies Donald Trump, "winning most of the time," always involved in something major, etc.
33ff Via a rather stretched analogy, the author describes this desire for affluence, for busyness as a journey further and further from God and towards Shaol--the Old testament "hell" with images of shadows, a dark, weak existence, and diminishing being. Likewise he likens it to Hades an area of darkness, silence and forgetfulness. The idea here is that we are not consciously present in our lives when we chase busy affluence.
35 Note this quote from The Odyssey where Odysseus meets Achilles in hell and calls him fortunate, and Achilles says, "Put me on earth again, and I would rather be a slave in the house of some poor and landless man, than king of all these dead men."
Chapter 3: Taking Money Seriously
39ff "The point I wish to make in this book is that money needs first to be understood--before we allow ourselves any moral stance at all... Authentic morality is the child of understanding. It may seem paradoxical, but what I am saying is that our lives have become a hell not because money is too important to us, but because, in a certain sense, it is not important enough." [So far this book has already become repetitive, and could be compressed from its 40 pages so far down to about 10.]
40ff On money as a form of energy [It is literally just that: you can think of money as a battery that stores economic energy... except that money is a "leaky battery" because the nation state dilutes the money supply over time]; note the footnote here talking about sociologist Georg Simmel and his book The Philosophy of Money, where money is the prime instrument in a modern culture enthralled by means and instrumentalities.
43-4 Quite a bit of arm waving and repetitive assertions here that we must take money seriously.
Chapter 4: Idealism and the Reality of Money
47ff The author tells a strange, rueful story here about himself in 1967-era Haight-Ashbury, walking into a shop selling religious items; the author gets outs his checkbook out to buy a prayer shawl and the woman at the counter tells him they only take cash; the author gets irritated and argumentative, and !!demands!! to speak to the owner, and the owner carefully folds up the prayer shawl and tells him to fuck himself.
50ff Now, years later, the author has [at least] worked out that the shop owner was running a business with real business problems... like dealing with bad checks. [Strangely the author describes the shop owner as "a lousy businessman" even now as he's working out the dynamics of what happened all these years ago. He knows he overreacted to the situation and didn't see it fully back then but yet he's quite certain that the guy is a lousy businessman. Interesting epistemic overconfidence here!] The author also realizes he was just as confused about money and also was preposterously egoic in that situation; that he felt then that he was somehow exempted "from dealing realistically with the world of money"; the author considers this encounter between a himself (a philosopher) and a spiritual shopkeeper to illustrate many of the confusions behind our attitudes toward money and he thinks it will help us go beyond our usual reactions to what we call greed or hypocrisy. [The reader begins to see more and more word salad here in this book as it progresses. Not only am I not quite sure what the author's point is here, he certainly has a roundabout way of saying it!]
Chapter 5: God and Caesar
53ff [This unfortunate chapter is all over the place, a word salad with a very weak thread, if any.] Comparing and contrasting Donald Trump to the spiritual shopkeeper in Haight-Ashbury; then comments on institutionalized religions condemning of the "lower" parts of human nature (like sexuality, etc.), then on the Church's position on usury. [I think what the author is trying to say is that just as the church saw man's base urges as secondary, that likewise his economic needs were also a secondary, but it is incorrect to assume that that which was secondary was also evil. He also thinks that the reaction we have in modernity, where modern life is money-focused and over-sexualized is a counter-reaction to this error. This is a strange thesis--and it has nothing to do with the meaning of life! This chapter really is a word salad.]
59ff Some [likely factually incorrect] statements about the origins of coinage here: that it was administered by the priestly class when first invented. Also some comments here about how Christianity encouraged interdependence, not autonomy and thus having financial independence carried the risk of making someone prideful, that it may "breed illusions of self-sufficiency."
64 Here the author give rather one-dimensional description of people who "fled to the deserts of Egypt to escape the horrors of Roman materialism and sensual excess"--this is a cartoonish rendering of that era's holy desert fathers and the society they sought to escape. He's also facile here with his church history: see page 66 where he offers a similarly cartoonish one-sentence definition of Protestantism.
[I can say now that this chapter was genuinely awful. You want the author to come out and say what he means, get to the point. But if he did that, the entire chapter would be boiled down to a sentence or two, like pages 70-72 which contain two sentences separated by two full pages of word salad: "It is solely a question of restoring money to its proper place in human life. And that place is secondary ... And if money is to be secondary in our lives, it can only mean that money serve the aim of self-knowledge. Here at last we have found our question. ...we must use money in order to study ourselves as we are and as we can become." All that word salad for such a pedestrian insight.]
Part II: The Coin of Greatest Value
Chapter 6: "Money and the Meaning of Life"
75 The author teaches a workshop/class called, coincidentally, "Money and the Meaning of Life"; discussing one of the women sitting in the front row, the author lets slip some of his own stereotypes about money here as he describes her blue eyes and "face of a poet": "How and why did this gentle woman sitting in the front row ever become a CPA?" [Good lord, I have a high school friend who became a CPA and she's just as gentle, what in the world does this have to do with being a CPA?]
76 Discussion of Max Weber, although the author appears to conflate worldly materialism with capitalism here. On how the materialism of the modern era is a misplaced religious quest.
79ff [Ironically this woman gets him to do what readers of this book obviously can't get the author to do (since this book is already written): she gets him to get to the point! Rather than letting him work gradually around to the idea that money could be an instrument for discovering ourselves, she gets him to discuss it right away. This is a fascinating irony: the author, in a wordy roundabout book, tells a story about how he was asked to "get to the point" in his wordy, roundabout class--that he writes about in his wordy roundabout book! I wonder if the author was ever made aware of the rather circular irony here.]
Chapter 7: Is There a Way in Life?
83ff The author continues teaching his workshop, using things he discusses there as content for the book. Discussion here of "the way" using the example of Arjuna from the Bhagavad Gita; Arjuna did not want to fight, but he must because it is his duty; this is a metaphor for entering the "Ring of Life" and engaging in the world; see also Zen master Hakuin, who talks about the duality of monastic life/artistic life versus a life in the arena of worldly activity: "The warrior can ride forth to face an uncountable horde of enemies as though he were riding into a place empty of people... Meditating in this way, the warrior can accomplish in one month what It takes the monk a year to do..."
87ff The author takes this idea and really runs with it, writing "In our time and culture, the battlefield of life is money."
Chapter 8: Solomon the Wise
88ff The author continues quoting liberally from his "Money and the Meaning of Life" workshop. [Note here the the characters are fictionalized/composites and therefore all of the conversations are likely manufactured as well: on one level this makes the entire thing technically "untrue" but then again on a rhetorical level the author can use these made-up people as mouthpieces to say what he needs them to say, plus he can weave the entire collection fictionalized statements and actions into whatever he needs to support his argument. Of course you have to gag on the argumentational ethics of it first, but it does make for an interesting device of persuasion and rhetoric.]
89ff Now an extensive discussion of "Solomon in lore and legend": how Solomon counsels us in the midst of life with its contradictions and anxieties; how the Old Testament is a "scarred battlefield" where new ideas once fought with old. [What is the point here? Please get to it] Quotes from Solomon from Ecclesiastes; and then the author asks "What lesson is being offered here? Is it only a sanctimonious injunction against the striving after material goods? This is how it's often taken." But the author differs, he argues that Solomon here is "engaging in the fullness of life" and that Solomon for the author represents a balance between metaphysical vision and worldly realism, that he's at home in both realms.
92ff God offers Solomon whatever he wishes when he becomes king of Israel, and Solomon asks only for an understanding heart.
94ff The author quotes at length, once again, from his class: unfortunately this really reads like word salad as well; a discussion of the legend of Solomon's throne, The author relates various images and legends that seem to be useless tangents, eventually returning to the idea that both spiritual and material impulses in man were opposed yet had to exist in harmony somehow, they had to be reconciled.
98ff Now the author describes what it's like teaching a class like this, where there is group communication, group pondering, where you aren't given ready-made answers, "I had to stay with my students in the state of unknowing" [??]
98ff On the paradox of Solomon: he has an understanding heart but at the same time did evil in the sight of the Lord when he took wives from other nations; the author takes this message literally that Solomon turned away from God's decrees and paid the price for disobedience. [Not to be one of those "ackshually" buys, but I think in this case these events occurred earlier in the evolution towards later Jewish theological doctrine, before Judaism had become monotheistic, before many of the cultural practices had evolved. But over the centuries these ancient texts had to be theologically "harmonized" with the later "deuteronomical" doctrine. Thus the deuteronomical editors had to make Solomon (as well as many other groups and individuals) "bad" for something that in during their own time probably wasn't.] At any event, the author doesn't get the answer to this paradox until the next chapter.
Chapter 9: What Money Can and Cannot Buy
101ff Re: the legends of Solomon, note the book And it Came to Pass: Legends and Stories about King David and King Solomon by Hayyim Nahman Bialik, which is available in the public domain, and likely worth reading. On the legend of the building of the Temple, where Solomon summoned demons to find the Shamir, which can cut stones to build a temple, the demons say they don't know but Asmodeus the demon King will know, etc. Solomon ends up capturing Asmodeus by getting him drunk with wine [in about 15 pages we will finally learn the relevance here, as money represents evil in the way alcohol represents evil this legend, but at the same time money (and alcohol) can be used rightly and ethically]; at this point he notices some of the class getting restless and announces the lunch break.
103ff The author, still in class, begins talking to the accountant/CPA "character" and learns how she struggles with a therapy aspect of her job, that her work isn't just numbers but also people souls, their hopes, etc.; on the idea of needing a "therapist-accountant" in society. Another student comes up to demand his money back, saying the class covered nothing that the course handbook claimed. The author palliates him by offering to buy him lunch and the three of them head out to a nearby "marginally upscale sushi bar." [Strange that the author adds in these things in a book that already should be cut down massively, it's as if he wants to hear himself write--which, I guess, means he is the right kind of guy to write a book like this. Sometimes the universe is perfect in every way. But increasingly I wish I were in a universe in which I didn't pick this book up.] The reader now also learns that the author is still working out what he wants to cover in the remaining half of his workshop [!!!], he now decides to cover "the way in life" the whole idea what he calls an "immense" idea.
107ff He and the attorney and the CPA woman talk at lunch. The author describes him as "This was a man who had too much money." It turns out the attorney, Bill, had inherited $65 million, all of his friends came to him for money, and he did give away money to these people, he had fallen into a distrustful mental place, he bought whatever he wanted, even things he didn't want. The CPA, Alyssa, asks him direct questions about his net worth, arguing that "precision is essential." [This dialog is so stilted the only thing the reader can tell is that it never happened.]
110ff The author frames Bill the attorney as lacking sobriety: to him money was a drug that he couldn't manage; in contrast, for Alyssa the CPA, money was an "instrument of the mind."
113ff On what money can and cannot buy: this is the reason Bill took the course, it was to understand this question; Alyssa argues that people use money like cotton batting to soften the edges of life although there clearly are situations in life where money actually is the answer.
114 The author begins to wax rhapsodic here at this lunch, and the speech he makes here is almost unreadable: "...money was created--by the keepers of the sacred teachings underlying all human societies--to maintain a relationship between man's spiritual needs and his material needs. What I'm trying to say is that money is intrinsically a principle of reconciliation, of the harmonization of disparate elements." [Again, this is more word salad, and there are so many needless words here my boy William Strunk would be spinning in his grave. One cue here: when you find yourself writing "what I'm trying to say is..." you ought to delete what you've written, including that clause, and replace it with what you actually mean.]
116ff Comments here on the money addict, like the alcoholic; money can solve problems or produce connections when used appropriately, but if you have a diseased relationship with it, like an alcoholic, you lose the ability to use money as a mechanism of relation between people. [A moment of unwitting humor here as the author tells the reader that the CPA can't follow his thread! If the author would be meta about what he's writing, he would know to rewrite it so the CPA in his story--and the reader reading all this--could follow his thread. This is where a good editor can really save a writer from himself.]
119 The chapter closes with Bill leaving up to pay everyone's lunch including all the other students that had shown up to the sushi restaurant along with the three of them. Alyssa looks at him with tenderness and pity.
Chapter 10: The King of the Demons
122ff The way the author continues with the Solomon and Asmodeus legend is roundabout and takes multiple chapters, it could be compressed enormously. The author, again, in love with his own writing voice, even runs a layer of [unnecessary] metacommentary here as he writes the class's reaction: "The class was transfixed. Not a sound, not a movement. The legend was doing its work. But how to proceed?" [Think about the wasted text here: The author is literally "pantsing" a class; he is writing about what is happening in the pantsed class to readers of this book, and on top of all that, he is writing about figuring out what to do in this class that he is pantsing... None of this has anything to do with a book that is supposed to be about money and the meaning of life! And by the way: I think I'd want my money back too if I found out that the professor was making everything up all the way through and taught the morning session while having zero idea what he would teach in the afternoon session.]
126ff The author decides to continue with the legend of King Solomon. Now after Asmodeus fooled King Solomon into letting him hold his ring, he then hurled Solomon to a distant and alien country; then, with Solomon out of pocket he changes into the face of Solomon and sits on the throne in judgment of the people. The author says the demon Asmodeus is the false self, the false sense of "I."
130 "I looked hard at my students and continued: 'the title of this course has been money in the meaning of life. We now see that it could equally have been called, money in the search for myself.'"
132 on the ancient concept of the "householder": a person with a good gut intuition about what really makes life go round.
133 More masturbatory meanderings about the class; the Alyssa/CPA character asks "What happened to Solomon?" and the author tells how Solomon wanders the wilderness with princess Naamah, he buys her a fish and she splits it open, and inside is the ring that Asmodeus had hurled away. Solomon then becomes King Solomon again after three years of exile. The author transforms this into a metaphor about the false self being displaced as the true self is finally awake; thus the legend is telling us to waken the true self, while remaining guarded against the false self.
Chapter 11: The Religion of Money
137ff "I disappeared from view during the afternoon coffee break. Much as I wanted to speak informally with the students, especially with Alyssa and Bill, I had to get off by myself and plan the remaining hour." [Again, why tell this--except to be masturbatory and spill extra ink? And again: why would anyone take a class that was totally pantsed all the way through, right up until the final hour? This is perplexing on several levels.] As he's trying to figure out what he's going to do in the last hour of class, he waxes rapsodic about Max Weber, thinking that he's actually a sort of spiritual figure.
140ff He pulls out some quotes from Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, more quotes from Poor Richard's Almanac, also Benjamin Franklin's phrase "time is money" and others to illustrate that there is "sincere piety" in the spirit of capitalism.
142 "In the writings of Benjamin Franklin and in the entire Protestant ethos which, according to Weber, Franklin epitomizes... [We're in deep trouble in this quote from author right from its first prepositional phrase, because Franklin in his actual day-to-day behavior was absolutely nothing like what he wrote in Poor Richard's Almanack! He spent a good chunk of his life banging aristocrats' wives in France. I guess do as I say, not as I do...] More comments on performing your duty, the ethic of meeting your obligations, paying your debts, etc. [Granted, this is exactly the ethos of a high-trust society--which the United States was for the better part of its first two centuries.]
146 At the end of his class is barraged by questions on a practical level: the students want to know how to put into practice what he had been speaking about on a theoretical level, since the class is out of time, he is forced to ask everyone to write their questions down and then he'll respond to them later.
Chapter 12: Questions
148 The author addresses some of the students' questions in this chapter [and the reader here gets the sinking impression that at least third of this book is just a recycling/repurposing of a course that he once taught. The reader is left both nonplussed and disappointed]. The various questions address the students' guilt and ambivalence about money, their concerns about wanting money when others have so little, their lack of understanding of why certain work pays more than other work, their anger about the maldistribution of wealth. [It's actually quite sad on a couple of levels to read these questions, because it means that after taking an entire workshop titled "Money and the Meaning of Life, they had none of their questions answered. Likewise, reading this book, the readers have none of their questions answered either.]
Chapter 13: Why Does Money Seem so Real?
152 This chapter opens with a quote from William H. Desmonde's book Magic, Myth and Money, claiming that the first form of money was shared food [sounds reasonable] but then extending the "significance" into a quasi-religious ritual, where economic relations were conceived of as religious relations [which does not sound reasonable].
154ff On materialism, on its error of reality perception, that materialism ignores of the inner world; the author believes that greed and possessiveness are results of naive materialism; what he calls a mistake of perception. The author then argues that we lost contact with our inner world.
158ff Word salad here on how modernity does not bring us into contact with our inner world but rather with the outer world. "Money, being the principal means of organizing and ordering survival in the outer world, thus seems the most real thing in our lives." Finally comments on how money is intrinsically a contradiction and we need to examine this contradiction "closely."
Chapter 14: Facing the Contradiction
163 On the contradiction "between the inner movement to the deep self and the outer movement toward the external world that is given by the senses and organized by the logical mind." [This sentence is a good example of the author's wordy, loose, unfocused writing. And this is supposed to be the chapter's thesis sentence!]
164ff On our fears of not having money, there is "no fear greater" for many of us. The way to address is it is "to search for a quality of inner experience that is at least as vivid and intense as our concerns about money" but "buying and selling are more intense and inwardly vivid than anything else." Again: word salad.
168 On the Western Middle Ages doctrine of the "mixed life" by "reanimating" monasticism with outer life.
170ff "...an individual must begin to take himself as seriously as he takes money... The first practical step that an individual can take to free himself from the thrall of money is not to turn away from it, but to take it even more seriously, to study himself in the very midst of the world of money, but to study himself with such diligence and concern that the very act of self-study becomes as vivid and intense as the desires and fears he is studying." [The author would do well to go over this book, sentence by sentence, and omit half or more of the words.]
Chapter 15: Things
Chapter 15: Things
173ff On looking at the problem of materialism from the perspective of how a more traditional society looks at things. The author features here a letter from one of the students in his pantsed workshop who had a shopping addiction: she more or less described each of her purchases as like a little mini-dream, this was how she described the burst dopamine she would get from each purchase she made; her concern here is if she stops shopping, what would she replace it with? "What will fill the void?" she asks.
177ff The author stumbles onto another insight, which is the exact same insight of the prior chapter, that struggling against materialism is to give more attention to "things." This is basically the same insight as the prior chapter [see the note for 170ff].
181 The last third of this chapter is sort of an "as remembered" [read: made up] debate between the author the CPA/Alyssa composite character about how to help the "I can't stop shopping" lady by telling her to be more mindful as she shops. She keeps interrupting him and he keeps saying things like "Let me finish" as if the author thinks this adds a sort of cinéma vérité to a self-evidently made up dialog.
183 "It's a grave error to imagine that by giving up the object of our attachment we become free from the force of attachment itself."
184 "I'm saying there was something far more interesting than what money can buy." [Once again, the author ends the chapter with a leading statement that he could just answer, tightly. But the reader is instead doomed to a new chapter, starting with a long tangent, that has nothing to do with this sentence at all.]
Chapter 16: Hypnotic Realities
185ff The Bill/attorney character reenters the chat after having read an entire library of books about money; the author spills more ink asking Bill to explain what he had learned; the author does something unintentionally [and hilariously] ironic here by writing, "Here I will reproduce only the gist of his screed and our reactions, leaving out all his interminable digressions, backtracking, footnotes, and his most rapidly and consistent moralizing. However, I retain many of his most interesting exaggerations." [This might be the most unself-aware pair of sentences I've read in my entire life]
187ff Discussion of John Law and the Mississippi Scheme [which is not well explained]; on knowing that fiat currency is just a belief, the money isn't backed by anything; basically the author discovers that money isn't really worth anything, it's just created by fiat by the government [it's always interesting to see what happens when an epistemically overconfident academic wraps his mind around this fiat money concept for the first time]. "Bill" goes through a very typical gold bug journey: once he learns that fiat currency isn't backed by anything, he becomes somewhat crazed by this knowledge. [Again this is a not-uncommon psychological journey for many people when they first come into contact with this idea.]
193ff While the author continues lecturing "Alyssa" and "Bill," Bill shocks them by suddenly opening a package filled with gold bars and coins.
Chapter 17: The Meaning of Gold
196ff The author shares a flashback to his childhood when his uncle gave him a one thousand dollar bill so he could use it to buy war bonds during a school war bond drive.
199ff The CPA lady asks Bill "just what are you trying to prove?" He replies, "This is real money!" The author's character then largely bigfoots the conversation here, talking about gold as a "sacred symbol." They have a debate about what is "real" in an information and service economy.
Chapter 18: The Currency of Illusion
205ff Here the readers is exploded to a long-winded discussion of epistemology: how we know what we know, what does it mean to know something, considering "the facts" of a glass of wine versus what it's like drinking it, on "knowing" that fiat money is an illusion but then really knowing it. On how we take information and think we form it into concepts and theories; on how much of our mental roadmaps yet remain based on illusory information, lies or propaganda. On the idea that information on capitalism creates new desires for mental information just like industrial capitalism created desires that it satisfied. The chapter then loses its thread into unrealistic conversational exchanges between the author and these two made-up characters.
Chapter 19: A Guide for the Perplexed
216ff The author and Alyssa are helping put together and pack up Bill's pile of books, and the author is pleasantly surprised to see Moses Maimonides' book The Guide for the Perplexed among them. He starts reading aloud/quoting from it. Comments here on limitless desire, on how we are suffering more from our desires than by any external thing, on how we're built to take, take take, get, get, get, we can't help it.
221ff On Maimonides' idea of obtaining just the bare needs to live in the material world, and using his remaining energy to gain understanding, both of himself and God.
227 Once again the author repeats himself, arriving at the conclusion that "the role of money is to serve as the instrument for getting understanding."
Chapter 20: The Gift
228ff The author quotes from Lewis Hyde and his "scintillating essay" The Gift, which differentiates between the "gift" and the "commodity"; a thing given to us like a book or a work of art, something that moves the heart, on how such a thing can't really be bought or sold, it needs to stay in motion by being given away yet again; contrasting this with the market economy which sells commodity-like products.
242ff The "Bill" character has a sort of emotional climax here, and he goes and gets his box of gold and gives it to the author, his voice cracking with emotion. The author rhapsodized here about his mental experience at this moment, but then says "I can't accept this." He then tells the reader "I will not try to describe this moment further" ....before describing it further for another two paragraphs.
Part III: The Indefinable Something that Enters into Everything
Chapter 21: The Hidden Key
251 The author now talks about what he originally meant to do with this book to keep its concept and subject more narrow, but then he realized he did not appreciate to what extent our attitude toward money is a key to understanding every aspect of our lives.
252ff Unnecessarily long discussion of a dinner the author attends with a bunch of VIPs to meet the editor-in-chief of Pravda; the author contemplates this Russian man through his stereotyped beliefs about Russians as a people.
264ff The author quotes himself as he is thinking out all of his reactions to this dinner/conference; he then he gets to ask a question (it takes three paragraphs for him to get through it), and the reader gets to experience, page after page, exactly what goes on in the author's mind as he thinks about what he's going to say--and even as he writes it out here, after time to think it though, time to think about how to put it, it is muddled. The reader isn't even sure what the purpose of this meeting with the Russian guy was even for, and the reader is even less clear here what it is that the author intends to say about all of this. "I walked back toward my car alone and in a turmoil of conflicting thoughts and moods. I was elated that the meeting with the Russian had confirmed my sense that the study of our relationship to money is the hidden key to seeing ourselves as we really are." [What?]
268ff On teaching our children about money, on finding meaningful work, on the question of selling out.
Chapter 22: Conclusion: Personal Gain and the Gift of Existence
278 "We come to the conclusion that money is so central in our lives because it now embodies most clearly the central problem of man's life on earth--the dominance of the principle of personal gain. [If you want to conclude your book in a way that your readers understand, have the first paragraph of your conclusion be much more coherent than this.]
281ff Extensively quoting Rainer Maria Rilke, who the author calls "perhaps the greatest poet of the twentieth century," asking why are we here on Earth?
285 Long quote here from Plato's work Critias, a passage about the people of Atlantis who lost their virtue, and their civilization began to decay; the people were about to be spoken to by Zeus, but then the fragment we have of it ends.
287ff The author now returns to the businessman from the introduction to the book: he asks the man what is it about making money? How do you make it interesting, both your work and making a lot of money? The author is sure there's something more to it than piling up material things, or having people envy you; The man reaches across his desk for a book of poems by Rumi and has the author read from it.
291ff A very weird section where the author spends two full pages talking about an awkward silence, where the author, respecting the businessman's time, makes a move to end the conversation, but the man doesn't reciprocate, the author makes a move to get up and leave and shake the man's hand, but the man doesn't reciprocate; finally he shakes the man's hand and a thought strikes him lightning: he realizes that this businessman, someone who the academic world would look down on--and did look down on if we really the panel of academics he was on from early in the book--is far more awake and enlightened than anyone he knows, and enlightened on the very subject the author wants to understand! He's more awake, more in touch with his inner being, more intellectual, and far, far more well-read than the author. The author turns around and quietly sits right back down at the man's desk.
296ff The man says "I agree with your main thesis - that in modern society money enters into every aspect of human life." And then they discuss the fable of The Fisherman's Wife, where the businessman frames the wife as an allegory for the desires of the ego.
298 "The businessman continues. 'The point is that, since money has entered so deeply into the formation of the contemporary ego, then it is necessary for us to play the money game with our best abilities, but with a new intention.' 'How would you describe that intention?' I asked. He paused before replying. I suddenly felt as though I were in a cathedral." The businessman concludes here reiterating the idea of the search for a new intention and a new morality in this real world we live in, and through this search "this world becomes my monastery."
Appendix I: The Brotherhood of the Common Life
299 The author addresses the 14th century spiritual community that sprung up around the figure of Gerard Groote, quoting repeatedly here from an unpublished manuscript by Ross Anthony Fuller called The Brotherhood of the Common Life.
Appendix II: The Fisherman and His Wife
311ff The author includes the well-known fable The Fisherman and His Wife to complete some of the ideas initiated by the businessman in Chapter 22); basically it is a fable about greed, although the way the author relates the story it seems muddled and not what I recall as the original fable. [Note also that a cynical man--not me of course if you're reading this Laura!!--might interpret this fable as a blatant warning against marriage...]
To Read:
Donald Trump: The Art of the Deal
Donald Trump: Trump: Surviving at the Top
Georg Simmel: The Philosophy of Money
R.H. Tawney: Religion and the Rise of Capitalism
Philip B. Yampolsky, trans.: The Zen Master Hakuin
***Hayyim Nahman Bialik: And it Came to Pass: Legends and Stories about King David and King Solomon
William Greider: Secrets of the Temple [on the Federal Reserve system]
Robert J. Ringer: How You Can Find Happiness During the Collapse of Western Civilization
Robert J. Ringer: How You Can Find Happiness During the Collapse of Western Civilization
Moses Maimonides: The Guide for the Perplexed
Lewis Hyde: The Gift
Norman Angell: The Story of Money
Fernand Braudell: Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800
Nancy Wilson Ross: Buddhism: A Way of Life and Thought