Is money evil or good? What is money?
Money is a medium of transaction. It was introduce to pay up debts, purchase any commodity and so on. Before money came to existence, trade by barter was in vogue. This was a process whereby you exchanged a belonging for another you needed. But people noticed that there was an imbalance in the transactions. For example, a man in need of a goat had to throw in a plot of land for the goat. This did not commensurate. Some people decided that this method of transaction did not make sense; so they decided to create or better yet introduce a material which would be valuable while value could be placed on everything. The history of money traces back to Egypt thousands of years ago. Back then, it was either in metallic form, gold or silver coin.
Nowadays, we find that money is the primary motivator for everything. Nothing moves without money. Some people even say that money makes the world go round. So this brings us to these big questions: is this non-living material ruling our lives or we are ruling over it? Actually, money is just the essential means to bring us comfort, luxury, safety and security that we all seek for ourselves and our families. The want and need of money arises from our desire to live a better life.
Money is not evil. Money is a blessing. Most people want money to live a better life and think of it as an essential element for happiness, which is not true. Happiness doesn’t require anything. In fact, people who don’t have anything are happier than people who have affluent. Perhaps true, because happiness is associated with accepting one’s fate and situation. But we need to ask ourselves one thing: are we here to accept our fate to be happy or are we here to fight our fate and do better in life even if that brings us unhappiness?
For most people, the desire for a better life almost always gets obstructed by lack of money in terms of the living standard they maintain or wish to maintain. One may call this wish or desire an ambition. Ambition and wish are always good for human. These are the virtues that has brought us this far. We are in space because of our ambition. We are trying to achieve cybernetic immortality because of our ambition, so why should the desire to earn more money be regarded as something evil? It’s a blessing if you have such wish, desire or ambition to earn more money. But it’s not a blessing when you want to do it by any means necessary.
Some people will say man has to survive by any means necessary. Some will even say man has to do what he has to do. These sayings are just causing us more harm than good. They are silently killing our conscience.
We need to nurture our conscience and our values as we are getting more civilized, organized, scientifically and technologically advanced. Not all reach people gain money by ill measures. There are numerous examples of filthy rich people who gained money by honest means. You know a lot of them for instance: owners of Microsoft or Google and so on…
So, is money evil or good? I say, don’t blame it on money. Money is a means that can make life easier in millions of ways. Money is a blessing, and it is most certainly a good thing. Your attitude toward life is what make things evil or good. If you have a negative attitude toward money, you will never be rich and you will never be able to help anyone. But if you have money, you can help others as well as yourself.