The obsession with money

Decades ago, renowned British novelist, John Fowles, wrote in a rare work of non-fiction, The Aristos, that “having, not being, governs our time”. In this sometimes startling statement of his personal philosophy, he further observed that “the great driving obsession of the last 150 years … is money”.

This obsession, he further claimed, is “the most obvious and omnipresent source of inequality and therefore unhappiness … [and] colours all our … ways of seeing life”.

To those who still promote the so-called “free market” as the guaranteed source of systematically eradicating the material and cultural inequalities in societies across the world, these words would seem patently false, because “free” participation in the market economy would seem to them to have validated itself historically as the only acceptable economic system.

Didn’t Francis Fukuyama write in triumphalist manner about the “end of history” after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent turn, on the part of the countries that comprised the USSR, to the marriage of capitalism and liberal democracy? To be sure, many thinkers have since repudiated Fukuyama’s claims, but still the belief is perpetuated by those people who benefit hugely from the market economy that it is the way forward, which will, in the end, ensure wealth and prosperity for all.

Several decades have passed since Fowles diagnosed the preoccupation of the time, and since then the obsession has arguably grown more severe, if not pathological. The fact is that (as political thinker Johann Rossouw argued recently), today, the virtues expected on the part of citizens are no longer, by and large, the ones associated with religious devotion, as in the Christian Middle Ages, nor even the patriotic virtues that accompanied the political ethos of the modern epoch’s national states, but those “economic virtues” that are inseparable from ostentatious consumer behaviour — buying, spending, getting rich (and being seen doing so), driving the latest luxury cars (whether they can be afforded or not), and so on.

This pervasive valorisation of material wealth — primarily in appearance — is, I would argue, the underlying reason for the spate of instances of corruption plaguing South Africa in various quarters, the suspected involvement of officials in the disappearance of R1-billion from the Landbank’s coffers being the latest instance attesting to this.

Anyone who doubts the applicability of Fowles’s diagnosis of the socio-economic situation in the 20th century to present-day South Africa merely has to think of the rapidity with which the obsession with lucre, prevalent on a worldwide scale, has asserted itself in South Africa since the fall of apartheid. And this at the cost of any significant demonstration of a social conscience on the part of those in a position where they could demonstrate a sense of responsibility when it comes to dealing in a morally exemplary manner with newfound wealth.

William Gumede, in his straight-talking book Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC (2005), devotes a chapter, significantly entitled “What’s wrong with being filthy rich?” to this preoccupation with money among South Africa’s rising black elite. And — in the wake of reports about the rate at which new “dollar millionaires” (5 880 of them) have emerged in the first year after the implementation of black economic empowerment legislation in South Africa, Thabisi Hoeane, in the Weekend Post of Saturday July 15 2006, remarks: “Clearly, if there is a growing number of people who are accessing the country’s economic benefits, then there is no problem. Disappointingly, it is apparent that this development is very uneven, as this category of people forms a miniscule segment of the population.”

To add insult to injury — and in the process giving the lie to the supporters of the “free market” as panacea for all economic woes — it recently became apparent that extreme poverty in South Africa has increased dramatically since 1994. Compare this news with the figure, above, pertaining to the increase in the number of “dollar millionaires” in South Africa, and it should be apparent to everyone that the market economy has only benefited a few and has increased the gap between the rich and the poor in this country — a country, it should be emphasised, where such economic gaps are among the biggest in the world.

So what is to be done? Would the implementation of social-democratic economic principles, in the form of extending social grants (already in operation for millions) to more citizens, be sufficient? It would probably help the poor to survive, but it would do nothing to combat the invidious belief that money is the sole good — a belief that has infiltrated society to the core and is in the process of corrupting the nation’s collective soul. Unless ways are found to demonstrate that there are more lasting and fulfilling values, this malady will continue to take its toll.