Money is a tool, and it’s useless without real motivation and vision

By David McElroy · December 31, 2011

I’ve always been unimpressed by money. I know I need it to survive, but I care little for most of the things people spend money on. The idea of accumulating it for its own sake has always left me cold. But I finally have a motivation for making money, so it suddenly matters to me. It’s an odd feeling to care.

A year ago at this time, I knew I was embarking on a year that would bring serious change, even though I didn’t know exactly what the change would be. I had an experience in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day last year that changed my perspective on where I was going with my life. It forced me to start moving away from politics. It also led to the creation of this site.

This week, something else has added a new layer to the changes I’ve been going through. Suddenly, I have an urgent need to pursue material success. It’s not for the luxuries of life that it can provide — because I still don’t care much for those — but it’s because of what it has the hope of leading to in another way. (No, I’m not going to be more specific about this one.) With this two-year oddity of post-Christmas timing, I’m now eager to see what God might have up His anthropomorphized sleeve for the same week next year.

Although I don’t want to talk about the specifics of what led to this, I do want to talk about the thoughts it’s sparked about money. We live in a society that worships money. On the surface, that’s a criticism, but I think it’s really a double-edged sword.

We complain about the over-commercialization of pretty much everything, and we talk of yearning for a simpler time when money didn’t matter so much. Despite that, it’s wealth that gives us the leisure to complain about commercialization of things. People living in poverty or living in a technologically backwards totalitarian state envy the choices we have. Those choices give us a quality of life they can only dream of. And despite the fact that it’s trendy (and sometimes justified) to complain about some people’s addiction to materialism, the opposite condition is just as bad.

People frequently say that money is the root of all evil. They think they’re quoting the Bible when they say it, but it’s really a corruption of something the apostle Paul said in a letter to Timothy. What he actually said — in the first sentence of 1 Timothy 6:10 (ESV) — is, “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.” In other words, money itself is neutral. It’s just a store of material value. But if you love money and crave the material things it can provide, it will frequently lead you down the wrong path.

So it seems to me that there’s a tension between two extremes. One extreme is represented by the materialist frenzy of modern shopping. The other extreme is represented by those who believe we should all live like self-denying monks. Just as with many things in life, the healthy attitude is somewhere in the middle — that of appreciating the comfortable lives that wealth makes possible, but not giving ourselves over to the lusts of consumption. Walking that line can be tricky.

All of this leads me to ask myself why I’ve cared so little about money. As I think about the need for a balance between the two extremes I just mentioned, I fear that maybe I’ve leaned too much in the anti-materialist direction. And I’m wondering why.

A possible answer presented itself to me earlier today. I suspect it might provide an insight into my thinking about money over the years. Could it be that I took the position of not caring about wealth simply because it relieved me of the emotional burden of worrying about failure? If you don’t care about something — and say you don’t want it — you don’t have to blame yourself or explain yourself when you don’t get that thing. I don’t like thinking that I might have lived this long handicapping myself simply to avoid the risk of failure. I fear it might be true, though.

Money is a tool. It represents how much value we’ve given to other people. If you don’t value what money can buy, it’s useless. If you value the wrong things that it can buy, it’s worse than useless. But if you have a vision of what money can ultimately do in a positive way — if you see something beautiful you can build with it — then money suddenly has a positive value in your life.

The early 20th century writer Napoleon Hill wrote of how useless money is to men without the proper motivation. In a chapter of his classic book, “Think and Grow Rich,” he wrote about how men are influenced by the women they love:

“The men who have accumulated great fortunes and achieved outstanding recognition in literature, art, industry, architecture, and the professions, were motivated by the influence of a woman. … Take women out of their lives, and great wealth would be useless to most men. It is this inherent desire of man to please woman, which gives woman the power to make or break a man.”

If Hill was right — and I suspect he was — my attitude toward money has been shortsighted and very limiting. I’ve been right in believing that many others put too high a value on it. There’s no question that you can set your life up in a way that your pursuit of money (and spending of money) take you away from the people you claim to love. But it’s also true that if you balance your life properly, the wealth you create can be a gift to your family or future family.

This is one time when I’m not sure I’m saying anything that’s applicable to a lot of people. Maybe I’m just working out my own feelings about a change I’m experiencing. I’m not sure. Either way, I can finally say that I’m ready to pursue wealth. Where will it lead? Ask me again a year from now.

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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?

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