Money isn’t evil, but obsession with money brings out worst in us

By David McElroy · August 13, 2018

They were a picture-perfect couple who seemed kind and loving. They both worked in careers that involved helping other people. They talked a lot about their faith and about “doing the right thing.” They seemed like wonderful folks.

But when they got in the middle of a business negotiation in which I was involved, their nice words went out the window. Their masks fell off. They were suddenly greedy and grasping, trying to scrape every last dollar out of a deal — even if that meant cheating the other party.

I’ve seen this over and over. Money doesn’t change people, but it does unmask who they really are. When they discover money is involved, you find out what their real values are. You find out how little they’ve meant the sweet words of love and happiness.

I’ve seen another example of this ugliness in the last few days. I’m no longer naive enough to be surprised by it, but it still hurts me. It still saddens me. It still leaves me wondering what sort of monsters we become when money becomes our god.

Some people love to claim that the Bible says money is the root of all evil, but scripture says nothing of the sort. Money is just a store of value. It represents the value of the services we’ve provided to other people. It’s a very neutral thing, in and of itself.

But in the first letter which Timothy wrote in the New Testament, he said, “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.”

Did you see the difference? It’s not money which is the root of evil. It’s the love of money which becomes a root of evil. That’s a huge distinction.

If you love providing value to other people — if you truly enjoy doing things which other people are willing to pay you for — you might very well become wealthy. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. But if your focus turns to the money itself — doing whatever you can to make more and giving up the things you need which might cause you to lose money — there’s something very sinister and unhealthy about that.

Worse, it’s very stupid — because money will never make you happy.

It’s very depressing to watch people become greedy when they’ve presented themselves as something better. If you pay attention, there are sometimes specific moments when you can tell that a switch has flipped — when a person realizes that there’s a cost to the love or good will that he or she has been promising.

If you pay attention to that moment when the switch flips, you’ll go cold and feel the blood pumping hard in your chest. You’ll feel love turn to stone. You’ll feel warmth turn to ice. You’ll feel something which had been presented to you as beautiful and loving turn to a vicious beast.

That’s a terrifying thing to watch, especially because the person you’re watching has no idea what a hypocrite he or she has become. You’ll lose respect for the person. You’ll wish you hadn’t seen what you’ve seen. You’ll wish you could go back to believing the beautiful loving lies.

You’ll wish you hadn’t seen any of this — all because you’ll know you’ve seen the worst of what a human being can be, because once the person loves money enough to change his or her values, every value can be thrown away. You’ll know what lies beneath the mask. You’ll know you’re dealing with someone whose values are those of a grasping and selfish person who thinks he or she must have it all.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with money. I want more of it. I intend to have a lot more money. I wish I had a partner to help me maximize my ability to make money and then cause it to grow some more. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with any of this if you make it honestly and ethically, in accordance with loving values.

The problem is when money creeps up on your list of values — when it becomes your god. When it becomes more important to you than the things you truly need. When it becomes more important than the promises you’ve made. And when it becomes more important than the values you believed really mattered to you.

I can’t get this latest example of pure greed out of my mind tonight. I can’t quit thinking of how this man’s values snapped from loving faith to greedy desire for gain.

He doesn’t realize I saw it. We will never speak of it. But I grieve for the cold heart which causes him to lie to himself about what truly matters in life. And I wonder if he realizes this is why he’s alone in the world. But that’s another story entirely.

Share on Social Networks

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

Related Posts