Mammon: The Root of All Evil, Pt. 1
Poverty is society's way of saying, "We don't find value in you or your work." Thank you, society. I find very little value in your work as well. Perhaps we’re just not a match. I will, however, continue making my work accessible online, for I know someday it will be of value, particularly to those whom acknowledge the suffering within themselves and strive to move beyond it.
As the work of an unknown artist from the turn of the 19th century continues to guide me (W. Blake), I know there’s value in this experience, this documentation, this lifelong artistic endeavor. For some of us, art is more than entertainment. It’s the only path out.
Although my past was filled with unawareness, on the verge of 33, Truth crashed into me, toppled over me, forced me to reckon with it, to reconcile it, and as long as I am aligned with it, I will always try to pay it forward. In that, I live and die with no regrets, in harmony with life and death, bound to nothing by nothing. Though life without money in 21st Century America, is an incessant struggle.
I had several opportunities in my life to serve Mammon. The first half of my 2012 album RIDE and my 2018 rock project, Rakefire, were my two “sell-outs.” I made very little money but learned my lesson. My lesson was to never again blaspheme my talent for money. To use The Artist in service of a corrupted society is the ultimate blasphemy. I learned that sustenance comes naturally, and The Artist finds its expression naturally.
To use one’s divinity, one’s talents in the pursuit of money is a virtueless endeavor, no matter how one goes about it. The human mind can produce all kinds of excuses as to why wealth is an acceptable endeavor, a “necessary” pursuit, but no matter how one goes about pursuing money, it’s an exclusive pursuit, and within exclusion there is only corruption.
To aspire towards a world where everyone has money is an inclusive aspiration. In this inclusive aspiration, “I” am not rich, because “they” are not poor. But one cannot become rich without the juxtaposition of poverty. The pursuit of wealth is, “I want to have more than them.” If everyone were wealthy, the concept of “rich” would be redundant and obsolete.
“But I’m pursuing money so I can make the world a better place. Once I’m rich, I can start helping people.” I’ve heard this sentiment repeated over and over throughout my life, particularly from fellow musicians and artists. We justify our ambition by qualifying it with some elusive idealism. We believe that if we repeatedly serve a corrupt industry within a corrupt society over the course of decades, eventually the scales will tilt in our favor, and we can begin “helping” other people whom serve the same corrupt society which made us wealthy.
There’s an innate arrogance in assuming “Once I’m rich, I’ll spend the money better than the other people.” It’s exclusive no matter how one goes about it. “I’ll be philanthropic once I get rich.” But why not be philanthropic now without leaching off society first? No matter how you go about getting rich, you have to suck it out of the pie from somewhere. If you’re completely honest with yourself, you want people to believe you’re special. You want exclusive treatment from your society first, then you want to show your society how good you are by giving some of the pie back to the not-as-special-as-you people.
The fact is, money is always an exclusive ambition. Let’s look at this sentiment once more. “I’m pursuing money so I can make the world a better place. Once I’m rich, I can start helping people.” Here’s another way of saying the same thing. “Once my corrupt society knows how good I am, it’ll reward me with riches, and I’ll do good things with my riches, because I want to make the world a better place.” Are you certain that you know how to make the world a better place? Or do you just want the world to become more like you? You want to make the world more like how you think the world ought to be?
What’s hiding behind this sentiment is, “I was born into a corrupt society, and I chose to service corruption by enriching myself, and although I’ve spent zero time on earth contemplating the existential nature of the world into which I was born or or the society into which I was thrust, I am certain that I know what the world needs to be a better place, and I am certain that I will use my own enrichment via corruption to serve my certainty of how the world should be.”
“I want my society to recognize that I’m better than most people and then I’ll become better than most people.” Why not skip the society part, and move straight on to bettering oneself? Because as long as you’re pretending your ambition is virtuous, you don’t have to face it. As long as your ambition for wealth, fame, recognition, sex, drugs and other compulsions are disguised as virtues for the betterment of the world, you won’t be forced to reckon with those desires. You were born with those desires, and you’ll die with those desires, and even those of us who satisfy all of our ambitions and desires will not find true fulfillment, because those desires and ambitions only grow exponentially. We will always desire one more thing that our neighbor doesn’t have; always desire a better looking trophy wife, a faster car, a bigger house, etc. Even billionaires compete with other billionaires.
Desire is just a game, and at the root of it all, Mammon rules this runaway train. At the helm of society, nothing, no one - just a false ideal, a self-driving machine, a figment of human imagination, cotton paper printed green with the faces of society’s past. Nowadays it’s all just numbers in machines which rule over us, numbers which propel this runaway train ever-so-elusively towards that inevitable cliff.
Perhaps an even more common approach to the service of corruption is simply denying it altogether. “My job isn’t corrupt, so I’m not serving corruption.” To ignore corruption is to serve it. Every link in the hierarchy of a corrupt society serves it, from top to bottom.
Even those who recognize the corruption within their chosen fields will say, “If I didn’t do this job, someone else would,” but this is only true as long as each individual chooses to serve corruption. Every movement towards the cause of an inclusive world began when someone made a conscious decision not to serve corruption, not to serve his and her own exclusive agenda.
Poverty isn’t the antidote to corruption. The antidote to corruption is living entirely consciously, entirely inclusively, making every decision, performing every action in service to the whole. Conscious inclusivity may not “pay off” immediately, but in the long run, eventually, it most definitely will “pay off” (Check back with me in 2025).
Poverty isn’t a virtue in itself. The true test of virtue is one who’s chauffeured in a limousine from a fancy restaurant to a five star hotel one night then sleeping in the woods and eating only nuts and apples for weeks afterwards, and in both experiences, one’s inner thoughts, emotions, feelings and energies remain exactly the same. If one can remain perfectly fulfilled in both settings without a single concern for future or past, without attachment, without longing for what one has or doesn’t have, than one has found true equanimity.
“But I want to make sure my children are taken care of!” Your children would be better taken care of in a society which wasn’t plagued by corruption. I can’t imagine being a child in the 2020’s, not in this society. We’re reaching a tipping point. Either be the solution or serve corruption. It’s not going to come from the top down.
Does anyone really believe that children who grow up wealthy are better off in any way? There’s nothing you could do to poison your children worse than handing them over to Mammon. Only a corrupt society would propagate this insane belief that one who has material wealth does not struggle. Firstly, it’s not true. Humans beings who have no equanimity will always find a struggle. Everything will become a struggle. Secondly, the struggle is what leads us to equanimity. It’s not just superheroes who find their powers through struggle. It’s not just a cliche. It’s an existential fact of life that we evolve through hardship.
In my life, my music, my writings and videos, this is the focal point around which my entire life’s work revolves: face your demons, evolve, become what you never thought was possible. Be the fish who jumped out of the water and walked. Be the thing that falls from the tree and learns to fly. Turn hardship into evolution. Use the struggle. Face the shadows. Be your own light. Human beings whom find comfort, stability and pseudo-security often become inert. The silver spoon is a slippery slope. Softening the struggle with a silver spoon may simply prolong the evolution, but it’s more likely a spoonful of poison. Either way, the struggle will come.
Most importantly though, children learn through experience. The Dad and Mom whose lives revolve around money inadvertently teach their children these false values, and the children grow up in the same redundant cycles of more, more, more. Can anyone on earth breathe in exponentially without ever breathing out? That’s the law of American capitalism. Exponential gains market means everyone breathes in exponentially, but what’s really happening is swaths of people are doing all the out-breaths while a few up top do all the breathing in.
I’m intentionally using the biblical name for the demon associated with money, Mammon, because I live in a society which pretends to model itself around that guy, Jesus, who repeatedly spoke against the pursuit of money, flipped over the tables of businessman, admonished rich men to give away all their wealth, spoke “it’s easier to fit a camel through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven,” and “Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” In Part 2 I discuss all the New Testament verses associated with Mammon and the pursuit of money.
Mammon: The Root of All Evil, Pt. 2
(Christianity Is Not Compatible with The Pursuit of Money)
“It’s easier to fit a camel through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven,” or so said some guy named Jesus. Every conversation about money I’ve ever had with a self-proclaimed Christian has led to me reciting this declaration made by Jesus, to which every Christian to whom I’ve recited it has replied with immediate, passionate, vigorous defense, as reactive as a sneeze, “Yeah, but not ALL rich people go to hell. Jesus is just saying it’s difficult, not impossible.”
The threat of challenging of one’s belief in money triggers a defense mechanism in people, something deeper than their awareness, something deeper than their religion, something buried deep inside their personal identities. People recognize it as a part of themselves, but it most certainly is not a part of the true Self, the inclusive Self. It’s a leach, an add-on, an unnecessary piece of baggage. It is classic, archetypal covetousness, and yes, for all intents and purposes, one might as well call it a demon.
If we all stopped believing in money, overnight money would become powerless and valueless. We all know this, and yet we let it completely rule over us, we let it control us, we make sacrifices to it, we let it determine our futures and allow it to manipulate our every desire. We speak of it as a living entity. We elect our leaders into office based on what it is doing. We let it inform our entire ideologies, our entire philosophies of life. It becomes justification for nearly every human endeavor.
We tell ourselves once we finish the thing we’re working on, we’ll be contented, we’ll be satisfied, we’ll be fulfilled, but we’re addicted to the pursuit of it as much as the thing itself. It takes us on a ride that never ends, always more, more, more, and we never have time to stop and contemplate who we really are and what we’re really doing. Our entire lives become a procrastination of our enjoyment of life, a procrastination of inclusivity - once we pay off the car, the house - once we get the next paycheck, the next raise, the next car, the prenup, the child support, the divorce settlement, then finally, “I’ll find joy once I retire,” but their is no “pay-off” at the end of this thing. The procrastination of joy is an entirely unhealthy, exclusive endeavor, and the true cause of death. In the end, we’ve sacrificed our entire lives to Mammon.
If that’s not the definition of a demon, than there’s no such thing as demons. Use whatever word one wishes to use for this phenomena. I see no reason not to use the biblical word for it. Its classical definition is as old and as new as time. We all experience this demon, and yet we keep spreading its disease, this idea that there’s a “right” way to serve this demon. What’s the “right” way to serve a demon? Stop serving the fucking demon!
How could Jesus have made it more obvious than saying, “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other, Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” Mammon is the demon of money. This couldn’t have been said more clearly. This is repeated over and over throughout the New Testament.
Why are American Christians so hand-in-hand, buddy-buddy with covetousness? How can anyone be this blind to their own ambitions? Desires? Greed? How can anyone be this blind to the values and virtues of their own religion?
Jesus repeatedly refers to Mammon as a demon, an enemy of God. There is NOT a single verse in the New Testament which says, “It’s OK to be rich as long as you do good things.” There isn’t a single verse which mentions money in a positive light. In fact, there’s way more instances of Jesus telling people to get rid of their money. “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor.”
In Mathew 6:19-21, Jesus tells us explicitly not to store up riches for ourselves on earth where it can be so easily destroyed and stolen, but to store up riches in the heart. “For your heart will always be where your riches are."
There is no verse in the New Testament which says, “Give your church money, because the church always does good things with money.” In fact, Jesus seemed to predict that virtueless hypochristians would use his words to empower their own covetous, exclusive pursuit of power, as they’ve repeatedly risen up across the world in his name. “Many false prophets will arise and mislead many.” “False Christs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and wonders that would deceive even the elect.”
Jesus: The Rebel
This is my favorite part of The New Testament. These verses in Mark’s Gospel, nearly verbatim in Mathew, show the rebellious spirit of Christ, the rule-breaker, the idealist, the brave renegade who fought the corrupt powers that be, and the conviction of one man’s all-inclusive spirit verses the world’s largest superpower. And this is when the priests decided they had to kill Jesus, not because he was “godly;” not because he was “magical;” and not because he called himself son of God, but because Jesus was screwing with their business. Jesus was rendering them powerless, and calling out their corrupt endeavor, their pursuit of money, as blasphemous. And by evening, Jesus had to leave the city, because he had made such a spectacle, screaming “blasphemy!”, flipping tables, astonishing the crowd who’d gathered, that there were now people, priests and scribes, plotting to kill him.
“15 And they come to Jerusalem: and Jesus went into the temple, and began to cast out them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves;
16 And would not suffer that any man should carry any vessel through the temple.
17 And he taught, saying unto them, Is it not written, My house shall be called of all nations the house of prayer? but ye have made it a den of thieves.
18 And the scribes and chief priests heard it, and sought how they might destroy him: for they feared him, because all the people was astonished at his doctrine.
19 And when even was come, he went out of the city.”
We all know how the story ends, but this is the beginning of the end. Mark 11 is the real reason Jesus was put to death in the most horrific way. Because Jesus took a public stand against the ruler of a corrupt society, Mammon.
Mammon loves his allies. He’s such a big part of the American ideal that we actually refer to him as “The American Dream.” He’s the promise that if we work hard, regardless of what the work entails, we will be rewarded. Arbeit macht frei. For decades, half the country continues passing the same 2% of the country’s wealth back and forth while the exponential gains market trickles up to the very tip top of a percentile of a percentile of a percentile, and we call this “The American Dream.”
For many Americans, the worst possible thing that they could imagine happening to themselves is to lose their jobs. During the Covid plague, a vast majority of the world stopped working, and what happened? Wildlife roamed freely. Air quality significantly improved. The world kept going. Vast majority of the world’s economy is nothing. Vast majority of the world’s economy is completely unnecessary. It’s work for the sake of work and things for the sake of things. Half of all of it goes towards “defense spending” against our ideological enemies. At the root of all of humanity’s problems, the root of all that we perceive to be “evil,” lurking deep within the identities to which we become so attached, that is where you’ll find him, the real enemy: Mammon.