Happy Independence Day
True liberation comes, paradoxically, from others
This is Vicki Robin. She co-wrote the book that started the whole financial independence movement, Your Money of Your Life. I got to visit her a few years ago and she made me lunch:
One thing Vicki says is "The first level of financial independence is liberating your mind." To me, there are several sublevels within this. There’s one level of mental liberation: the desire to break free from the demands of capitalism and the endless work-spend cycle. It’s desiring the liberation of owning every hour of your life.1
More levels of liberation
A second level is having an emotional distance from the assumptions of capitalism. Culture tells us what is valuable and what is worthy of our attention. This issue here is that we’re surrounded by the messages of capitalism. Writer Mark Manson says:
The vast majority of information that we’re exposed to is some form of marketing. And so if the marketing is always trying to make you feel like shit to get you to buy something, then we’re essentially existing in a culture designed to make us feel like shit and we’ll always want to overcompensate in some way. - Mark Manson2
What I find fascinating is that our material prosperity has been fueled by our sense of not-enoughness. Now that I’m become inured to the capitalist excess of the present day, I don’t want to live like people did fifty or a hundred years ago. No one I know does either. So the hamster wheel of not-enoughness continues.3
So it’s the third, deeper level of mental liberation, which is fun to talk about today, Independence Day, which is liberation from the mind itself. It’s liberation on a spiritual level, an increasing detachment from your ego’s ever-escalating need for safety, achievement, display, and status. This may be the most difficult level to get to and the root of everything else. Once we get used to more, enough is no longer enough.
“The record shows that, for society, the richer we become, the harder it is to live within our means. Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.” —Nassim Taleb
Why do we constantly want more? And what are the deeper effects of always wanting more? The Czech writer, dissident, and later President Vaclav Havel wrote:
“[We] have deep moral crisis in society. A person who has been seduced by the consumer value system, whose identity is dissolved in an amalgam of the accouterments of mass civilization, and who has no roots in the order of being, no sense of responsibility for anything higher than his own personal survival, is a demoralized person. The system depends on this demoralization, deepens it, is in fact a projection of it into society.”4
Render unto Caesar, render unto God
I’m reminded of the Biblical line, “Render unto Caesar which is Caesar’s, render unto God which is God’s.” There are a lot of interpretations of what it means but I, without being a Biblical scholar, have always took it to mean that that we are both human and divine, that we live both in the material world and a spiritual world.
My spiritual director Mark calls it the horizontal dimension (material) and the vertical dimension (spiritual). Where the two meet, is the axis mundi, the center of the universe. Our job is to live in the paradox of being both human and divine. Or less poetically and more accurately, to be human is to both material and spiritual.
Which brings us back to money and the question: what is enough? As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, it’s the financial version of the Serenity Prayer:
God grant me the serenity of mind to accept what can be bought with money, what cannot, and the wisdom to know the difference.
In other words, know what we need to do to live in the material world, and know what we need to do to live in the spiritual world.
Private goods, Public goods
Money can buy anything you want in the material world, but wisdom will tell you that it’s not enough. There's a soul part of you that yearns to be fulfilled and nothing your soul wants can be bought with money. To go back to my man Francis Weller, the things that feed our souls are called primary satisfactions:
From the moment we are born, we expect to be a part of a tribe; to step out of our enclosure in the morning and see many pairs of eyes looking back at us; to find those people there to meet us and to affirm us; and to go and gather food with them and build a fire and perform the rituals the community needs. When that doesn’t happen, we feel a great emptiness, even if we aren’t consciously aware of it. And then we blame ourselves for the emptiness, asking, What’s wrong with me?5
It’s the deprivation of our primary satisfactions that fuel that sense of “What’s wrong with me” our sense of not-enoughness. That’s the hole we try to fill with secondary satisfactions: rank, privilege, wealth, status. In the lingo of Alcoholics Anonymous, addiction is the belief that something outside of me is able to fix something that's inside of me. It’s the addiction to our ego, to the idea that something outside of me: achievement, success, status, can fix not-enoughness, that fuels capitalism. And that in turn capitalism continues to fuel.
Here’s the thing about primary satisfactions. When you look at primary satisfactions: a sense of safety, of being known and affirmed, of being part of something, all these things can only be received from others as a gift. Put another way, imagine trying to buy these things and you see the problem. In a demoralized society, we addictively try to get private individual goods to substitute for public community goods. And it’s the public community goods that will liberate us from our egos and our not-enoughness.
Living in the Gift
So to restate: you can buy some important and good things in capitalism. But fulfilling your material needs is necessary but insufficient, to use the logic term. What your soul needs can only be fulfilled from things freely given by others: their care, their attention, their love. Once you have enough of the material necessities, the best way to get what you really want is to offer them freely to others. The way way to get what you really want is for you to live in the Gift.
As the Beatles said: in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.
James Baldwin wrote, “Freedom is not something that anybody can be given; freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be.” Freedom is something people take. As in the plural. Your deepest freedom will ultimately come when we recognize (sees again) that we are truly liberated when we let go and offer ourselves to each other. True liberation, ultimately, paradoxically, comes from others. We will be free as we want to be.
Happy Independence Day, everybody!
In the theme, Mark Manson wrote a post about the #FakeFreedom in capitalism as well.
There’s a wonderful story of a party thrown by a billionaire on Shelter Island, where Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history. Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have … enough.” - The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel.
https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/the-power-of-the-powerless-vaclav-havel-2011-12-23
https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/478/the-geography-of-sorrow