I wonder often if there's any relationship between guilt and gold - that the love of
money is the root of evil. It's a very true saying. Because you see I was saying yesterday
that the difference between having a job and having a vocation is that a job is some unpleasant
work you do in order to make money, with the sole purpose of making money. And there are
plenty of jobs because there is still a certain amount of dirty work that nobody wants to
do and that therefore they will pay someone to do it. There is essentially less and less
of that, that kind of work because of mechanisation. But if you do a job, if you do a job with
the sole purpose of making money, you are absurd. Because if money becomes the goal,
and it does when you work that way, you begin increasingly to confuse it with happiness
or with pleasure. Yes, one can take a whole handful of crisp dollar bills and practically
water your mouth over them. But this is a kind of person who is confused, like a Pavlov
dog, who salivates on the wrong bell. Saint Paul said that the labourer is worthy of his
hire. And I as a philosopher, mere philosopher dealing in higher things, always insist that
I be paid for my work. And I get the highest fee I can get. And people say, "Oh you're
just out for money." I say, "That's none of your business." Because I give most of it
away, my own needs being extremely simple. Although I enjoy good food, I don't even own
a television set. And you know it's a very simple life but I've got enough. And enough
is as good as a feast. You see a lot of people don't feel happy unless they have another
thing beyond money which is called status. And status, to a very large extent in our
economy, consists in conspicuous consumption, in having this thing and that thing and the
other thing and having a swimming pool, a Ferrari, a certain kind of clothes, a certain
kind of house with an enormous ranch-style picture window and so on and so on and so
on. And we think we need all that because we've been persuaded by a certain kind of
propaganda that that's how we ought to live. Because we haven't asked ourselves whether
that was what we really wanted. In other words, we've been propagandised into thinking what
we wanted. I remember when my daughter was in high school, insisted that she had to have
a certain number of cashmere sweaters. In those days I couldn't afford them. I said,
my dear do you really want these? Or have you just been reading ads in the magazine,
or listening to the other children? Because, you see, schools are places where you send
your child to be brought up by other children. therefore, they get a kind of lowest common
denominator of culture. They all think they got to have this, you’ve got to have that,
and they don’t really want it. If they sat back and considered: Do I need all that, is
this trip really necessary? They would come to the conclusion that it wasn’t and that
would be very important because they would save energy. You all know, of course, that
we are nearing an energy crisis, that there is not enough physical energy going to be
available for all the things we think we’re supposed to do to, go rushing around, and
so on. So, we need to take towards commerce a more relaxed attitude.