Money and Manipulation: They're Not Going Away

In many ways, human beings are simply animals. We’ve been trained to think of ourselves as above other species, and so we are: in practical intelligence, in our capacity to be self-aware, in our ability to reflect, in the fact that we have developed language as the prime medium for passing along survival information through stories in all kinds of forms.

But we’re not so far away from our primate cousins in some departments. It is arguable that many other primate species practice human-like behavior in controlling access to the food supply and regulating sex partners. Fights over such control break out among plenty of other animal species, indeed some far lower down the evolutionary ladder than primates of any kind.

All of which is to say that, while we might call it “manipulation” when referring to the way humans play control games with each other, it is in fact something that is not unique to us. Hypothetically, if homo sapiens were to last long enough to evolve into a yet higher form, our successors might master manipulative behavior and eventually abolish or outgrow it. Given what we know of the history of species, the only thing that is clear about such a proposition is that nobody alive now will be around to witness such a development. More likely, manipulation itself would be taken to a new level rather than cast aside.

But who am I to say?

My point is obvious. Manipulation is bred into human beings. The breakthrough, if you want to call it that, is that some human beings have evolved to the point that we are conscious of manipulative behavior and thus can make conscious choices about how we deal with our control needs over other humans.

Even less needs to be said about money. If we didn’t have money, we’d have bitcoins or some such thing performing essentially the same function. Indeed, bartering, trading in various commodities, dealing with “paper wealth” indicate that a medium of exchange is assumed to be essential to human endeavor. How we manage money, how we construct economic systems, how we collectively choose to control those systems are negotiables.

Theologically, both manipulation and money are by-products of the essential human quandary, namely how shall we deal with our propensity to be our own gods? Many of our stories raise that question. That is the central issue addressed in the creation narrative found in Genesis 2. According to our foundational myth (it is a universalizing story and therefore a true “myth,” not factual history, should that need to be said), the original man and woman —“Adam” and “Eve”—were innocent until they yielded to the temptation to “become like gods, knowing good and evil.” Similar stories pop up in other cultures. Prometheus steals fire from the gods, a primordial theft that allows human beings to exceed previously determined boundaries. Stories with similar motifs are found in ancient Tamil and Sanskrit sources, which are possibly related to the Prometheus tradition. Wagner’s Ring Cycle begins the theft of gold and tells the saga of how that sets in motion a struggle that literally rocks earth and the Valhalla of the gods. All these myths feature human beings usurping divine power.

Mine are generalizations, but they serve to illustrate how ancient is the human penchant for aspiring to control. Since the will to power and its modus operandi greed have been with humans from the beginning, the practical question becomes how we deal with power and its chief symbol and medium: wealth.

That’s precisely the field on which political war is being waged today, and, one can argue, where the battle has been fought all along. The thing is we are not living in the ancient world, or in the Western medieval system of feudalism, but in the era of democracy, now showing severe signs of stress resulting from (guess what?) growing strength of people that want more and more power to gain more and more wealth to finance more and more power to become wealthier and wealthier, ad infinitum. In such a system, never is there a built-in stopping point.

The result, of course, is that wealth can only come from so many sources. An obvious source is the earth itself. So, everything wrested from the planet becomes potentially a commodity. Gold, silver, precious stones, other medals, coal, oil. In the last several decades even water has become a growth industry as the supply of it shrinks all over the globe. It is bottled and sold. But long before that, “water rights” were sold and bought and now have become a growing concern in the age of climate change and environmental degradation.

The other source of wealth is people. Those who amass more and more power and money can only do so if supported by servant classes doing the work that they themselves depend on but won’t perform. This has created a larger and larger class of people all over the world that survive by serving their societal superiors. To be sure, those who work to stay alive are serving their own communities. But the illusion is that everybody has the chance to be a part of the action and to have a piece of the pie. To anyone paying attention, the dice are loaded, the game is rigged by the very people who have the power and the fortunes to do so.

There are exceptions. There are still places where intelligence is rewarded. It is not that no one can get into the system, but that the system is more and more reluctant to admit participation to those not already in it. If this is not changed, the possibilities of justice and widespread prosperity will become more and more remote.

I’m not an economist nor a sociologist I am a theologian. What I know is that not only the Christian gospel, but the dharma of Buddhism, the rich Vedic and Tantric traditions of Hinduism, the wisdom tradition of Judaism and the mystical tradition of Islamic Sufism all offer not only critiques but alternatives to this amassing of power and wealth. They have their positive assessments of material prosperity, but they also call humanity to live by values of generosity and service, guided by values of honesty, fairness, and truth.

The critical need now is for people of faith to speak in clear, compelling terms of the sine qua non: justice—economic, social, personal, juridical—and to follow the teachings of our wisdom traditions. Those traditions collectively challenge us to range ourselves on the side of the poor, the vulnerable, the dispossessed, the marginalized. We cannot wait until there is consensus around these matters any more than the old Hebrew prophets could wait for general agreement before they made their pronouncements about the priority of justice (Amos), relationships (Hosea), speaking truth (Jeremiah), envisioning a new and better future (Ezekiel), or articulating the nexus of suffering, hope, and community renewal (Isaiah).

To do that, we must first deal with a very serious development: the rise of White Christian Nationalism. We’ll get to that in another blog article.