Money

M. Bogen, "Green Frog Skin World," acrylic, money, & frog stamp on board, 1993

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One of the greatest things I ever saw on TV was on Oprah. It must have been decades ago because I don’t know when I would have been home and watching during the day. Grad school, early 90s? No matter, because the lesson was timeless. So this guy comes on and proceeds to tear up or maybe burn a hundred or a thousand dollars in bills. The audience went insane with moral indignation. He could have given that money to a noble cause, to the hungry or the homeless or something like that, they cried! Well, the flaw in the logic is pretty stark. By that standard, no one would ever spend a dime on anything that wasn’t socially beneficial. This is the path you go down with the ethicist Peter Singer. One would subsist on just the “essentials” and distribute the rest to the unfortunate. But that’s just not how life works. As I quickly learned during the early days of the pandemic lockdown, with its admonition that only essential activities could happen outside the home, it’s the nonessential things in life that make it worth living. Yes, that includes those things that money can’t buy, but you better believe it includes those things that money can. I would even include luxury items in there, but the truth is that as you get toward the higher end with luxury you enter a zone of diminishing returns. But most of all I think of those things like ice cream or a drink, shared with a friend. These things help you love life, and you need to love life enough to even be a person who wants to help others, or at least that’s the best place to be coming from. Much more satisfying than acting out of obligation. 

That said, I think the main point the guy was making is that money is not zero sum, like a mound of potatoes. Oprah understands this, which is why she had this fellow on and why she herself is richer than God, and also why she can give away absurd amounts to noble causes. One’s mental relationship to money can be a big factor. When you tear it up you are taking the mystical power out of it and giving it to yourself. It helps puncture a fearful relationship to it. If you’ve ever seen an interview with Warren Buffet, it’s clear that he sees money and wealth development as a form of play. Personally, I had to get past the fanatical aversion to money of my youth, indeed my demonization of it, before I could start to make any. Ultimately, the lesson is that money is an abstraction. I’m not saying it isn’t necessary in concrete terms and that people in society as it is don't need a baseline level to get by, but that money is sort of mysterious. For some reason we have constructed a whole civilization around it. Probably because an abstracted currency-based society does allow for an incredible amount of flexibility, diversity, creativity, and freedom, even as it does present the possibility of exploitation, flimflammery, and the deprivations of poverty. 

Around the same time I saw the guy tear up that money on Oprah, if it’s when I think it was, I had another enlightening experience around money. I was looking at a book of Native American art and saw that they would take European coins and use them in jewelry. Those coins had no meaning for them and they had no use for it except as aesthetic objects. In his great memoir, the Lakota Sioux named Lame Deer observed that for the Europeans that forced their way into their territory around 1900, when he was born, the dollar bill was everything. But in the context of the traditional culture in which he was raised, it meant nothing. Which is why he called the world of the Europeans the “green frog skin” world. So I decided then, must have been around 1993, to cut up a dollar bill and gather some coins and create a work of art in tribute to Lame Deer and that indigenous perspective that saw money in a whole different way.