Friday, September 09, 2005
'Money is the Root of all Evil'
Had a pretty interesting and heated discussion on this topic with some camp people, so this blog will represent some of the arguments brought up.
The question of whether money is the root of evil is cannot be easily resolved on the literal level. Money, taken literally is basically a yardstick to measure the value of an object. Which is why we pay thousands for a computer and perhaps only a dollars for a packet of soil, ie, we value the computer more than a packet of soil. Thus, to argue on this literal level that money is the root of all evil is like saying an hour is bad or a kilometer is good. This makes no sense because money is only a measurement of value, it is the interpretation that is more important.
So given that on a literal level no meaningful argument can be made, what can money represent? It can be argued that money is the representation of human greed, afterall, human greed mostly involve material comforts that can be directly correlated to money, since money is a representation of value. Thus the initial question is now rephrased - Is human greed the root of all evil. In order to show that human greed is the root of all evil, it is necessary to proof that human greed is both an intrinsic property of human behavior and as a result a root cause of evil.
Again on the surface, it seem very plausible that human greed is intrinsic to human behavior. How else can u explain the proliferation of crime on all levels of society, from robbery in the slums to white collar crimes in the board-rooms of Enron. However this fails to take into account inter-related complexities in several respects. First, such cases are the exception rather than the norm. For every robbery committed, there are thousands of other people who try to eke out a decent living. For every crony board of directors, there are hundreds of others who are honest. Of course, the debate can continue in this fashion, but the trend is that the wrong doers are generally a lot less than the do gooders.
Why is this so? While it can easily be assumed that this trend is due to human nature, this assumption is in fact inadequate. Humans are creatures of incentives (or disincentives). In the case of crime, the law reach of Law (or the believe of it), is usually sufficient to deter crime. Indeed, in countries with a lax system of justice, its crime rates are generally higher than a country with a sound system of law and order. A country with a high GDP per capita is also more likely to have a low crime rate as there is no incentive to break the law when there is lawful employment available. Thus it is difficult to give a general trait for the behavior of humans, given the myriad of factors involved, but it can be argued that people will response to incentives.
Does this response to incentives therefore constitute greed and thus lead to evil? I think the answer is no. Because just as a sack of money on the table is an incentive to steal it, the security guard with the big shotgun is a disincentives to going near the money. Incentives works in both ways and thus actually holds in check the forces of greed that man has. And upon closer examination, one will reach pretty much the same conclusions about the nature of evil. Just like the two faced god Janus, the evil of the nuclear bomb is now one of the leading alternative fuels, while the good of vaccines is now part of a very evil bio-chemical warfare policy.
Thus to say that money is the root of all evil is far too simplistic a statement. Humans may not be the personification of saints but they are surely not the devil's advocate either.
10:59 PM
