The Curse of Excess Money
On the perils of the Mammon Parasite
I recently finished reading a piece of fiction. It is something I haven’t done in a long time. Too long of a time. All too easily I fall into the “fallacy of non-fiction exclusivity”, believing that acquiring new knowledge, philosophical wisdom, and brute scientific facts are the all-important, all-encompassing pursuits for a non-fiction writer. I forget I need stories too.
The book that broke my prolonged fiction-fast was The Pearl by John Steinbeck. And I needed it. It is a remarkable piece of literature; a timeless parable which forces the reader to uncomfortably rethink their relationship to that most fundamental piece of our lives: money. Numerous non-fiction books on money and its dangers sit on my shelf, but none has had the power to affect me quite like this story has. Stories can penetrate the deepest parts of our inner being — the places where character, convictions, and world-views dwell; places where facts and statistics are confronted with a double-locked door.
Jesus, the master parable teller, knew this all too well. With a ruthless conviction that can only come from a divine-man utterly intent on warning His sheep of a deceptive and perilous foe, Jesus went for the Mammon’s jugular vein in His parables of The Rich Fool and The Rich Man and Lazarus. A tragedy it is, then, that Judas, who sold God Incarnate for 30 pieces of silver, never listened to his master’s wisdom.
The Pearl is a story about an indigenous coastal community in La Paz, Baja California Sur. Pearl fishing is the community’s staple industry; a tireless and dangerous pursuit requiring poor fishermen to spend their lives diving under the perilous sea, seeking the pearls which will come to adorn the necks and ears of the rich and wealthy — but which the pearl-fishers themselves can only dream of possessing. Instead, these lowly men have to sell their illustrious harvest to the pearl dealers: an unscrupulous cartel who ensure the pearl fishers are never paid a fair price for their labours.
But while a gross injustice may lie at the heart of their vocation, the community of pearl fishers and small business owners in this close-knit town is rich, convivial, and full of vibrant life. That is, until one fateful day when a “the pearl of the world” is found by one (un)fortunate fisherman named Kino.
It was a life changing discovery. Finding the massive pearl, “the size of a seagull’s egg”, gave rise to the tantalising promise of happiness, wealth, and security — a future beyond Kino’s, and his wife Junita’s, most lofty dreams. The lustre of pearl illuminated a bright and burning hope in this poor man’s chest — and ominously, it lit a burning desire in all his neighbours’ chests too. All too often, darkness stalks the very place where the light shines the brightest — hiding in the shadows, waiting for its moment. And the darkness which follows on from a blazing light is the deepest of darkness indeed. The spirit of envy, greed, and malice is one such manifestation of this deep, dark darkness.
It is astounding how rapidly this darkness descended upon the once convivial community. It took only the passing of a night. This darkness is what I call the Mammon Parasite: an ugly conglomeration of covetousness, greed, and divisiveness that attaches itself to the places and people to whom wealth suddenly comes. It is a parasite that sucks the lifeblood out of a person or community whilst depositing the self-replicating virus of mammon-fuelled vice in its place. And it is mightily virulent.
In Baja California Sur, the Mammon Parasite deposited its deadly diseases of greed, envy, selfishness, and deceit with startling ferocity. The hapless, defenceless community was ravaged and beginning with the devious doctor — who represents the gold standard of injustice, greed, and perversity — the community turned upon this small family with a greed-fuelled violence that metaphorically ripped Kino’s heart and smashed it into a thousand painful smithereens. And in doing so, this community lost its own heart too, until all that was left was the smouldering ruins of a once vibrant place and the deepest grief of a mother who has lost what even a pearl with infinite value could never buy.
The pearl promised much but destroyed almost everything worth having. This is the uncanny devilish habit of wealth — mammon.
As I have reflected on the story and the moral message Steinbeck is seeking to impart, I have dwelt upon one thing: how receiving an abundance of money all too often is a curse to a community rather than the abounding blessing it is often believed to be. An analogy from chemistry may help. The bonds of a chemical compound, when subjected to excess heat or energy break apart — and the consequences can be explosive. Likewise, what heat does to a chemical compound, excess money and the desires it evokes can explosively do to a community.
Civility, neighbourliness, kindness, conviviality, and selflessness — the essential dispositions of a healthy community — are all subject to significant stress when a community is flooded with abounding money — whether from an unexpected windfall, a lottery win, or the discovery of natural resource wealth. The community can quickly find itself suffering from ‘sudden wealth syndrome’1, whereby the onslaught of excess money upends previously stable relationships and erodes the necessity for neighbourliness and cooperation (as residents become self-sufficient and increasingly beholden to expensive but now affordable modern loneliness-enhancing gadgets and devices). Members grab what they can from the share of the wealth and demand that their wishes, projects, and ambitions are foregrounded in any “community vision”. Thus, the community destroying vices of competition, envy, and greed bubble up like volcanic gasses from the red-hot hearts bitten by the Mammon Parasite. The infected community is never quite the same again.
The stress and strain become especially intense when it is one individual member who becomes inordinately wealthy, as happened in The Pearl. Suddenly, everyone’s differing (and often competing) wildest hopes and dreams are awakened, and the wealthy one becomes both the dream-maker and the one currently standing in the way. Neighbours and members must demonstrate that they — through past friendships, blood relation, or past good deeds — have a claim to a portion of this wealth, and with sickly charm and flattery they try to work their way into the wealthy one’s affections. And if they are rebuffed? Well, then, flattery quickly morphs into jealousy, hatred, scheming, and slander. And perhaps even thievery.
It matters little, though, whether the windfall comes to the entire community or just one or two members. The community is likely to be forever changed. Sometimes, when wealth is stewarded with wisdom, fairness, and skill, the result is an abounding blessing. But this, I believe, is rare. More often, the mammon-saturated community is plagued by the Mammon Parasite and all the ills it brings — and with tragically persistent consequences.
Trust, neighbourliness, and conviviality take years to form but a mere moment to destroy. Money cannot buy them back. It is the loss of these communal virtues that the Mammon Parasite-infected community will come to bitterly lament. That is, unless it heeds the warning that the Master Parable Teller ruthlessly proclaimed and the wisdom at the heart of The Pearl — and thus steward the excess wealth wisely.
Money, wealth — mammon, have a cruel habit of promising much but paying little; they can even take all the good that you ever had and burn it in front of your helpless eyes.
“Money whips us around like a tornado, money and capital, greed and ambition and hunger and power, they uproot people and scatter them about and we all keep our heads down as the Machine passes through, drizzling us across the landscape of the world, breaking the link between people and place and time, demanding our labour and our gratitude, hypnotising us with its white light, transforming us into eaters, consumers of experience and consumers of place, players of games, servants.”2
Localists and those who advocate for small communities need to be patently aware of the destructiveness and seductiveness of mammon. Though my words above may be somewhat hyperbolic, excess money remains a potentially toxic force with the potential to break apart a community. As I have argued before, modern society struggles to navigate the blessings and curses of abundance. Thus, localists must resist the common urge that many development practitioners suffer from which is to merely throw money at problems and needy communities in the vain hope of solving them.
But what should a community, like the one in France that was recently bequeathed 10 million euros,3 do when an unexpected windfall arrives? Firstly, they must realise that this immense moment calls for immense wisdom if they wish the community to be held together. And secondly, they should consider wasting the money.
Wasting almost certainly was not the verb that you expected to read. Unless, that is, you happen to be a student of David Fleming’s work. Mr. Fleming notes in his masterful magnum opus, Lean Logic, that excess money and growth-capital can overload a closed loop system4 and cause it to violently and fundamentally fracture. One solution to this serious problem, he suggests, is to “intentionally discard” or waste this excess capital to ensure the system remains in equilibrium. This is achieved by investing in non-growth systems or by using up the wealth in “carnival, play, folly, and fun”5 and beauty. Limits are thus respected and the community — and all that is truly valuable — is preserved. And it has some fun.
Some examples of this phenomenon that Fleming notes from history are when a small village built a disproportionally big church, or threw countless feasts and festivals, and when individually wealthy members built beautiful buildings and created “unnecessarily” beautiful goods6. We still enjoy their “wasteful” labours to the present day.
Though those at the helm of our modern states may lambast a community that commits to a path of intentional waste for not contributing to national wealth and productivity, the intentionally wasteful community has done what is right and necessary for its own protection, its own conviviality, and its own health. It has done something which will last beyond the pitiful 5-year plans of centralised states which seem to be dominated by one word: growth — but which seemingly lack the capacity to produce much of true and lasting value.
In an age that is infatuated with growth and highly susceptible to the Mammon Parasite, if we want beauty, conviviality, sustainability, and wholeness for our communities we must be prepared to be intentionally wasteful.
Redecorate the town; build beautiful community buildings and spaces; create a community orchard; hold a giant festival and feast; alleviate pollution; plant native trees; set up a community relief fund; help struggling small farmers; house the homeless. Do the things which strengthen the bonds of community, convivially, play, and beauty — and you will do well.
The economists may well say you are wasting your money by not investing it in their growth-based schemes. They may call you foolish, imprudent, and even morally wrong. But don’t fret. As Fleming, Steinbeck, and perhaps even Jesus would reply, “wasting” money in this way diffuses the potential for excess money to break the community apart and invests in what is truly valuable and enduring. For there are few more valuable things in life than a healthy, beautiful, and convivial community.
This essay is free, but any tips given (or paid subscriptions) support my work, help me to write more pieces, and are greatly received by this young writer. I hope that by “wasting” your money in this way you will feel like you are investing in something worthwhile.
Navigating Abundance
It is blackberry season here in the ‘Land of Eternal Sunshine’ (the ever so slightly tongue-in-cheek name I give to my home county of Essex, England). The berries in the Non-Conformist cemetery behind our house are already shrivelled up — casualties of the relentless and scorching “Indian Summer” England has been basking in — but a few miles away on the Common land I visited last week, the berries were only just ripening. These wild bramble bushes laden with scarlet berries which will soon become black, juicy, and ready for harvesting. Now is the time of year when nature’s abundance is on full and glorious display. It is an abundance for all to enjoy without exclusion: rich or poor, young or old, native or foreigner — for nature does not discriminate.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/suddenwealthsyndrome.asp
Paul Kingsnorth, Savage Gods. Two Dollars Radio. p. 5.
https://www.thetimes.com/world/europe/article/we-thought-it-was-a-joke-man-leaves-10m-to-village-with-same-name-5ngps23k3
Though not in our modern globalised and interceoonecred world, no community is strictly closed-loop, we shall consider communites as being such here.
David Fleming, Lean Logic, p. 222.
It is worth noting how ornate even the most common utensils were from past ages.
Your commentary on financial waste made me think of Notre Dame. They threw untold mountains of money to repair it, and it’s so beautiful. The cathedral will continue to be cherished for centuries because people were willing to “waste” that money.
I am experiencing this first hand. The small coastal town I live in has suddenly been overtaken by massive cruise ships. One enterprising local built a private dock and in the last 2 years we have had 580,000 people come from April-October. Most days, the population of tourists in town exceeds the population of locals. Our main road is shut down on cruise days so the tourists can wander, but we then are cut off from our banks and other businesses. We only have 16 miles of road total and those roads are filled all hours with huge tour busses and vans. We also have tourists on Ebikes everywhere, blocking traffic and trespassing. As a result, half of the population wants to set limits on the number of ships that can come here to a reasonable, safe amount, the other half is getting wealthy from those cruise tourists and wants to increase the numbers without any regard for the pollution and hazards they are causing. It has turned our once peaceful town into an extremely stressful place to live and the wonderful community we have always enjoyed spends their days and nights online at each other's throats. It's very sad. And supremely disappointing to see former friends and neighbors destroying each other online over mammon. The worst of human nature truly does come to light when sudden wealth arrives.