These symbols, although intrinsically of no value, assumed the same value as things, and men, or at least most men, became engaged in the acquisition and accumulation of the symbols of things. They did this even when they no longer had any need for them. The symbols were the surrogates for the rocks piled in the cave against the coming of the night. Now, think of this system as being reinforced over and over, through hundreds of generations and thousands of years, through social approval, ritualization, and acculturation.
That there was something basically wrong with this way of life may be exemplified by the fact that those who refused to subscribe to the accumulation and storage of things, Christ, Mohammed, and Buddha, became the founders of the world’s great religions. Well, the idea is not to stop collecting our rocks entirely, especially if we have families to think about, now and in the future. The idea is to collect our rocks wisely, or in these days, just collect a few.
I attended a conference recently, where one of the excellent speakers pointed out that 96 percent of the American people fail to achieve financial independence. The reasons for the virtual total state of impecuniousness rampant in the world’s richest country are four. One, the high cost of living. That is, price and wage spirals, inflation. Two, the high cost of living high. Consumerism and a credit card society and philosophy where people in the millions are searching frantically for things to buy, instead of putting the same money to work in income-producing property and investments. Three, high taxes and multiple taxes, and taxes on top of taxes. Taxes that make our real take-home income look like a sheared sheepdog.
A family finds it’s earning $20,000 a year, after a raise in pay. The man and his wife are ecstatic. What they fail to realize is that the raise in pay has only kept pace with the rising cost of living, but at the same time, the raise in pay has placed them in a new tax bracket. They’re now paying more taxes on money, which does not constitute a raise in real pay at all. But they don’t realize that, and they move to a larger house, basing their choice of home on the old established multiple of four times annual income. But they think their annual income is $20,000 a year when in actuality, it’s more like $12,000. And they start living on $20,000 a year, and trying to pay for it with $12,000. And it’s then they find themselves getting behind what’s known as the power curve. They find themselves borrowing money this year to pay last year’s income taxes, then find that they have to pay this year’s taxes plus the amount they’ve borrowed, plus the amount it takes to live on their new, higher standard, which is based on an amount of money they’re not really earning anyway. Add to this the higher cost of living, for everything from schools and lawn tools to eggs and gasoline, and our new young executive with his Brooks Brothers suit finds that he’s developed an entirely new capacity for sweating, and for lying with his eyes wide open in the dark.
ENTREPRENEUR TIP
Do you know your tax bracket? Really know it? With recent changes to the tax law, you might want to follow up with your CPA or tax professional to make sure you clearly understand how those changes affect you. Knowing where you stand can help you make better business decisions going forward. As Nightingale mentions, don’t misunderstand your bracket and live above your means.
So number one is the high cost of living, number two is the high cost of living high, number three is high taxes, and number four is the high cost of leaving [dying], which in all likelihood will bring you face-to-face, for the first time in your life, with the cost of probate and the wolves of the IRS with regard to estate taxes. At one time, we all lived in a large pasture in which we were free to frolic, work, eat, and reproduce. And then the government cut the pasture in half, with income taxes. Then it was cut in half again and again and again by added taxes. It’s not too difficult to see why 96 percent of the American people wind up flat broke and disillusioned about how to play the “collect the rocks for the cave” game.
It’s true that some people are able to collect the symbol of things, money, even when they no longer need it. But they constitute perhaps one-half of 1 percent of the population. And it’s better to have a few more rocks than you need, since none of us knows for sure how long they are going to live and need them, than it is to run out of them entirely when we’re 65 and still have 15 to 20 good years ahead of us.
Let me try to remember an example of how what seems to look good can be something entirely different in reality. Let’s say you have $10,000 invested at 10 percent compounded—a very handsome rate of interest, you’ll agree. That brings you a return of $1,000. But you’re in the 50 percent tax bracket, which cuts that down to $500. Add state and local taxes, which take another 6 percent or 7 percent, and you’ve got $460 or something (and we’re being very generous; the rate of inflation this past year was figured at 7 percent), well, when you get through, you had a net return on your 10 percent of $10,000 of—get this—minus 2.5 percent. What looked like a truly regal return on your money was in actuality putting you in the hole. That’s why the majority of working people in our society have a negative cash flow: Earnings do not produce security. We need to put that $10,000 into a tax-deductible investment that will produce no current taxable income, that will produce tax free buildup and eventually, when you need it, a tax-favored payout, since it’s capital gains. In addition, we need an orderly method of transferring our estate at death to an IRS-approved investment and trust arrangement.
But first, we need to find the income we need so that we can create a meaningful estate. And to do that, we must either augment our means or diminish our wants, as Ben Franklin suggested. We must live within our means, whatever those means happen to be. If we can theoretically afford to live in a $100,000 home, let’s live in a $50,000 house and agree to apply a two-point common sense rule to everything we buy or want to buy. Whenever we find ourselves facing a buying situation, we test it against two questions: One, do I really need it? Is it necessary? Then two: Can I afford it? The second question should be based on an actual understanding of what our true income is, after taxes, after expenses, and after provision for our future.
I heard about a high-income doctor who faced imminent bankruptcy. He was deeply in debt, owed last year’s taxes, and was living beyond his means. Working with his financial planner, in two years he was debt free and saving money the right way. It’s seldom too late to get squared away, but we must guard against letting our living standard go up as our income goes up, because as a rule, it’s not a real increase in income at all. It’s just keeping pace with inflation and putting us in progressively higher income tax brackets.
Albert Camus wrote in his notebooks, “It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.” And if you don’t think he’s right, try it sometime.
ENTREPRENEUR TIP
Think for a minute how Nightingale’s outlook here can be updated for a modern business environment. How can your business serve its community beyond providing goods or services? The answer could be social entrepreneurship. By including a social justice element in your business through volunteerism, donations, or selling products/services with a social impact, you can still realize profits while leading the charge for greater socioeconomic parity in your community.
Ogden Nash wrote, “Certainly, there are lots of things in life that money won’t buy, but it’s very funny: Have you ever tried to buy them without money?”
What do those who are trying to help the poor and the disadvantaged want? They want and need money. They need federal and state money, but that money comes from hardworking people. It comes out of the money in the pocketbook, whether it’s a person or a company; all of it comes from taxes. We need to build whole, new, clean communities and better schools; we need to tear down the rat-ridden, mind-grinding, spirit-killing human dumps that exist in our big cities and replace them with cleanliness and order. It can only be done with money and more money.
THE ROLE OF MONEY IN SOCIETY AND BUSINESS
G.B. Shaw wrote of the Seven Deadly Sin
s: food, clothing, heat, rent, taxes, respectability, and children. Nothing can lift those seven millstones from man’s neck but money. And the spirit cannot soar until the millstones are lifted. You know, millions live under the weight of a constant pressure, are torn by a ridiculous ambivalence that there is somehow something wrong with money, that money is evil. That to think about money and plan how to earn more money, indeed, to earn a lot of money is, is wrong somehow.
G.B. Shaw also wrote, “Money is indeed the most important thing in the world, and all sound and successful personal and national morality should have this fact for its basis.” Remember that, as Logan Piershall Smith put it, “There are few sorrows, however poignant, in which a good income is of no avail.” The myth that there is something evil in money was put in the minds of the masses by those who had all the money. “Keep them poor and stupid and we’ll stay rich,” was the slogan of the rich in those days. Today, we know that the best thing that can happen to people, to all of the people, is a measure of affluence, a substantial, more than adequate income.
You know, Karl Marx’s mother once said, “If Karl, instead of writing a lot about capital, made a lot of capital, it would have been much better.” There was a mother who knew what she was talking about. If all we did was sit under a tree and meditate and pass wisdom along to passing strangers, or wander the country, teaching a better life with no spouses, children, mortgages, taxes, dogs, schools, medical bills, automobiles, clothing, food, transportation, and clubs to concern ourselves about, we wouldn’t have to pile rocks in our cave. But most of us seem to want these things, despite their onerous cost, and so maybe it’s a good idea to find ways of having them without sweating ourselves into an early grave.
C. Northcote Parkinson is the discoverer of Parkinson’s Law, which states that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. There is a similar automatic growth that takes place in organizations. For instance, in the British Navy, when the number of ships began to decline, the number of people employed continued to grow. When the British Empire began to dissolve, the number of people employed to administer the affairs of the Empire continued to grow. To this day, the number is still rising, even though the Empire has disappeared. Someone predicted that if everything continues on course, by the year 2195, everyone in Britain will be working for the government. One of our large banks did some research and came to the conclusion that if the trend for the last ten years continues, everyone in America will be working for the government by the year 2049. Meanwhile, the concentration of economic power continues. Anthony Jay, in his book, Corporation Men, concludes, “It seems almost inevitable that well before the end of this century, most of the wealth of the Western world will be controlled by three to six hundred giant international corporations. The only argument now is about the exact number.”
YOUR SELF-DEVELOPMENT
[Here, the author moves from a discussion about the role of money in relation to self-development to a more direct application.] The definition of entrepreneur is one who assumes the risk and management of business, an enterpriser. And I read in Ethics, the international journal of social, political, and legal philosophy published by the University of Chicago Press, in an article titled “Kierkegaard, the Self and Ethical Existence,” by George J. Stack of the State University of New York, a quotation of Kierkegaard that should make us all stop and think. He said, “There is nothing of which every man is so afraid of as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.” And then Stack writes that one can refuse to seek self-knowledge, can live an unexamined life or call fall into moral indifference, but the life of such a being is not the life of a person, nor of an authentically existing individual.” He then wrote, “Not to take up responsibility for one’s self is to lose the possibility of being a self, and by coming to know the actual self, as far as this is possible, one accepts responsibility for what one has been, and one is now capable of deliberate choice. Choice integrates the various aspects of the self, unifies and consolidates the diverse, often contradictory tendencies of the potential self.” In another place, Professor Stack writes, “One of the most primitive forms of self-alienation is manifested when an individual does what they want him to do, ‘they’ meaning significant others, dominant or influential others, even though it’s something which he consciously does not want to do.”
Perhaps we should hit those points in order. First, it’s by finding ourselves that we can come to know how enormously much we’re really capable of doing and becoming. It is not by acting a part, trying to live like other people, living a secondhand and derivative life that we come to know our real powers. It’s by finding ourselves. It’s by examining and exploring ourselves and taking full responsibility for ourselves. Not to take up responsibility for one’s self, as Professor Stack writes, is to lose the possibility of being a self, and by coming to know the actual self, as far as this is possible, one accepts responsibility for what one has been, and one is now capable of deliberate choice. Choice integrates the various aspects of the self, unifies and consolidates the diverse, often contradictory tendencies in a potential self.
One of the most primitive forms of self-alienation, of cutting ourselves away from the real and powerful person we truly are, comes about when we do what “they” want us to do, even though it’s something we consciously do not want to do. In another part of the article, Professor Stack writes about the importance of choice and says, “We do not deliberate about driving our car from one place to another, from our place of work to our home. We simply do it voluntarily.” There are, however, specific moments when we’re confronted with choices that we know will have important ramifications for our lives. A person may ask himself, ‘Should I pursue this career or that? Should I live in accordance with ethical categories or not? Should I marry or not? Should I serve in combat in time of war, or should I be a conscientious objector? Should I believe in the existence of God or not?’ There are some options which one encounters that are momentous options for ourselves. And the important thing is to choose.”
Since this resoluteness is an affirmation of one’s self, an expression of one’s individuality, irresolution is either an incapacity to choose or an unwillingness to choose. What is lacking is serious or passionate concern. The great quotation by Emerson pops into my mind. He said, “What a new face courage puts on everything.” It’s by having the courage to make the decisions that represent our real gut choices, to take responsibility for our decisions and our lives, that we will find our true powers.
As Mumford writes, the great mass of comfortable, well-fed people of our civilization live lives of emotional apathy and mental torpor, lives of enfeebled desire, secondhand lives. He said, “The Greeks had a word for this pallid simulacrum of real existence. They called it Hades.” I think it can be said that the great majority of people do not really live, as we like to think of that word, at all. They spend their lives as puppets, with the strings in the hands of “they.” What “they” say, what “they” think, how “they” live.
George Stack reminds us that Socrates held that “it is by no means necessary that everyone become a man,” and Kierkegaard held “it is by no means necessary or inevitable that one become a person or an integral self.” The act of choosing is not only individuating, but it’s an act whereby the individual both expresses and attains freedom. The primitive freedom an individual has is the freedom for possibility. Before William James, Kierkegaard insisted that “only in a world in which there is possibility is freedom itself possible.”
FINDING PERSONAL FREEDOM
Freedom is not, as it was for Spinoza, the recognition of necessity, but it is manifested in and made possible by the appropriation of necessity and possibility. Human freedom is not given as such, except as a possibility that may be actualized. It is the finite freedom of a person who is shaped and influenced by some circumstances that are outside his power. Man is determined in his being, but determining in his becoming. Choosing one’s
self as determined is a condition for the possibility of realizing one’s self as free for possibilities positive for one’s self, and not to act on a possibility is to run the risk of losing that possibility. And I’ve long been of the opinion that trying to play it too safely is about the best way in the world to remove most of all possibility from our lives and end by missing the boat, and by missing ourselves and our powers.
Dr. Frederick S. Perls agreed with this idea, too. His book, Gestalt Therapy Verbatim, is one of the most charming, educating, and refreshing books I’ve read in a long time. I’ve become a fan of gestalt therapy [which focuses on personal responsibility and experience in the present moment], and as he points out in the frontispiece: “To suffer one’s death and to be reborn is not easy.” I think we do this when we shrug off the phony life imposed upon us by others and the environment as much as we can and take responsibility for ourselves and our future. The meditation in Gestalt Therapy is great; it goes like this: “I do my thing, and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you and I am I. And if, by chance, we find each other, it’s beautiful. If not, it can’t be helped.”
The great Robert Louis Stevenson has long been one of my favorites, not just as a great writer, but as a man as well. Plagued by a frail body and poor health, destined to die at just 44 years of age, he put more living, more travel, and more work and talent into his short time here on Earth than a million so-called average men. The author of Treasure Island, Kidnapped! and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Stevenson once wrote in a small essay:
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