Maybe love of money is not so much the root of all evil
as the cause of most stupidity
Dionysus granting Midas’ wish
painting by Nicholas Poussin
King Midas was a dream CEO. Thanks to the gift he requested from the god Dionysus, everything he touched turned to gold. That’s why ‘having the Midas touch’ has become a shorthand for anyone with exceptional money-making ability.
Here’s this Phrygian king, Midas, and he’s even greedier than the top guys at Enron. The accumulation of wealth is all that matters in his life. That’s why he made his fatal mistake.
One day, he found the Satyr Silenus, drunk as usual, wandering around lost. Recognizing who he was, Midas treated him kindly and returned him to his master, the god Dionysus. In return, Dionysus said he’d grant Midas anything he asked for.
Despite being hugely rich, what Midas wanted most was infinite money-making ability, so he asked that everything he touched should turn to gold. Dionysus granted his wish and . . .
Whoa! Everything?
That’s right. The Ancient Greek gods were a tricky bunch. Dionysus gave Midas exactly what he asked for.
Food? Drink?
Yes. Midas quickly found he couldn’t eat or drink; couldn’t touch his beloved daughter or kiss his wife without producing an exquisitely detailed, solid gold statue. Everyone fled from him in terror and he quickly realized he would starve to death. So he prayed to Dionysus to take back his gift. The god told him to bathe in a certain river and the gift passed into the water, so that the sand in the bottom became streaked with gold. After that, King Midas, who had finally learned his lesson, hated gold or any other wealth, and so became a kind of ancient environmentalist, living a simple life in the fields.
A desire for wealth may not bring you what you expect
Many people in business today are consumed by an similar obsessive desire for riches. Organizations expect executives to put profits before everything else. From time to time, top CEOs are credited with ‘the Midas touch’ and fêted in the media and on Wall Street. They, and those who aspire to be like them, put money before everything else. It doesn’t matter what they have, they always want more.
Yet such an exclusive focus on wealth comes with a heavy price, as King Midas discovered. Excessive working hours have become the norm for people seeking the riches and power of top executive positions. But 80 or 90-hour weeks? Isn’t that the kind of work regime that goes with the worst sweatshops—or slave labor in Nazi death-camps? Are highly educated, top professionals in some of the richest, most advanced countries in the world really doing this voluntarily?
I’m not sure that love of money is the root of all evil, but it’s certainly behind a great deal of current stupidity: Bear Sterns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers . . . the list goes on and on.
Remember King Midas
Money is a cruel master. Setting wealth and profit above everything else means there will be no time for most of what makes life worth living. No time to hang out with friends or relax over congenial drinks. No relationships without any motive save affection. No time for family. No time to enjoy life or love or the pursuit of happiness.
Is that truly the mark of a civilized nation—or an aberration we should stop now, before it ruins all our lives?
Midas didn’t think before he asked for his fatal gift. Fortunately for him, the god was merciful and let him change his mind. Are we thinking right now about the actual cost of the modern corporate obsession with short-term profit? Will we be able to change our minds before it’s too late?
Technorati Tags: obsession with wealth, greed, love of money, happiness, enjoying life
September 18th, 2008 at 6:39 am
I love your writing and your willingness to offer a valuable insight into current events. Let me offer another take on the story, which might offer some additional insight.
The gods punished Midas for not understanding gold’s value to economic workings. Gold (or any other money) really has no value in and of itself. It is simply a convenient intermediary to allow for the exchange of really meaningful things.
For example, if I have pears and you have chickens, I could exchange three pears with you and get two chickens. We would be exchanging meaningful valuable things. However, the fixing of exchange levels and the determination of value is almost impossible under this sort of direct exchange arrangement. Hence the reasons for gold or money. It’s much easier to make the exchange and determine the value against an abstract intermediary. So our three pears are worth $1 and that two chickens are worth $1 and our exchange is much simpler and it allows for meaningful exchange of many more things much more simply in the entire economy.
This brings us back to what the gods punished old Midas for. Midas forgot that it’s the pears and the chickens that have value, not the gold. There’s a subtle, but important difference there. Businesses need to produce things of value. If they do, they can exchange it in the market at a good price and excess money will result.
One can just as easily lose themselves in the process of producing items of value as they can by obsessing about money. Business people lose themselves in the processes of their work. It’s an interesting historical footnote that there were about the same percentage of workaholics under Communism as there are under Capitalism. That is probably a tenet of the human condition that one will not change.
The lesson business people maybe ought to take from King Midas is the importance of focusing on what your business produces that is of value. In a multi-layered complex society, if one thinks about producing money rather than producing items of value, eventually they will do neither. It was often noted in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s that GM made money from their financing divisions not their automobile production. They forgot what it was that they produced that was of value and we can now all see the results.
GM is probably the clearest modern example of an organization dying from the Midas touch. The problem of a percentage of humans devoting too much of their time, thought and energy to ”work” is present in any nation or group. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is debatable, but it is more likely a measure of human nature than civilization. I’m not sure that was the lesson the gods wanted to impart with the myth of King Midas.
September 18th, 2008 at 7:05 am
@Andrew Meyer: Thanks, Andrew. A great comment—useful and insightful too. Keep reading, my friend.
September 18th, 2008 at 9:36 am
As usual you are spot on. I also like the supplement from Andrew Meyers. Wealth is good for it gives you material to enrich your life in exchange. If it takes away your time and ability to use them it is as good as nothing. You can have everything but what good it serves if you can’t get time to use them. At times we get blinded by the dazzle of gold and forget that its value comes not from itself but from what it can get us. It gets devalued when nothing is available in its exchange for it can’t be of any use to us by itself. Greed is a sort of mental blindness which makes us to accumulate without considering the use. Anything is valuable only when it can be of use and otherwise it is useless.
September 18th, 2008 at 10:55 am
@sambit: Thanks for your thoughts, Sambit. I agree that value isn’t always what people think it is. Keep reading, my friend.
September 19th, 2008 at 4:25 am
An interesting story to retell at this juncture in history, and certainly has some valid points to make.
While the story alludes to people running away from Midas, no other thought is given by you or the other respondents as to the effects on others. I cannot remember whether the myth has the wife and daughter being turned back from gold, but the fact is that the Midas touch doesn’t always have a positive outcome for those touched by it.
This has particular relevance in the context of the failure on enormous commercial giants, for, while the Midas’s heading these organisations up may suddenly find themselves millions of dollars poorer, they still have the acoutrements they acqured while building their “empires.” The consequences for the employees, pensioners and soon-to-be-pensioners whose livelihoods and retirement savings have suddenly evaporated is calamatous, and the additional cost to society as a result is likely to be astronomic.
For me it proves that there is no such thing as “super-profits” because over any given period - even if it is 150 years, as in the case of Lehman Brothers - the net result after taking the losses into account is probably the same as it would have been if the company had “stuck to the knitting” in the first place.
Is there any way that we can get that message out there so that it finally sinks in?
September 19th, 2008 at 7:06 am
@Bay Jordan: Thanks for your thoughtful comment, Bay. What you say is almost certainly correct.
I may not have made it clear in my post (you always miss something out in making a story short enough for the web), but there is nothing in the original that suggests the people turned into gold by Midas were ever turned back. Midas had to live with their deaths on his conscious for the rest of his life. Those chickens nearly always come home to roost sooner or later, which is exactly what has been happening on Wall Street.
Sadly, people’s memories are both short and selective. This isn’t the first time that the greed of a few has caused misery for many, and it won’t be the last. There’s something in the human psyche that lets each generation feel it can’t happen to them—until it does.
Keep reading, my friend.
September 19th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
John Ruskin tells the story of a man on a ship buffeted by storms. The order comes to abandon ship and the man gathers up all his gold to take with him. He jumps into the sea and is dragged to the bottom by the gold he treasured. Ruskin asks: “Now, as he was sinking, had he the gold? Or had the gold him?”
September 19th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
@Wally Bock: Thanks, Wally. Nice story add-on. Keep reading, my friend.
September 23rd, 2008 at 1:29 am
Great parable from the Greeks about wealth accumulation. And I think the writers did mean to say that going for something single minded, will create waste and losses in your life. So the warning is not only to think before you ask something of the gods, but also to assess what you have and what you do not want to lose.
The story of course is also a warning to those, that think that helping someone should be rewarded with something more valuable then the help given. So it also says something about how much you should value yourself. Are you that important, that you are entitled to everything you ask for? Or should you remember that human live has its boundaries?
So in the end you could say, valuing yourself is important, as we as humans have value in and of ourselves and to others. But we should never forget, that our value is not defined by what we own, but what we are. And that is what most workaholics forget. They forget their own value, and only find value in what they do. So in that sense they are the same as king Midas, who forget that his value was not in his gold, but in the fact that he could help someone who had lost his way.
So the answer for the workaholic is someone who tells him to be human. And to be human is not to work all days of your live, but to discover which things you like. It is even built into our brains. New and exiting experiences lead to growth of our brain. Daily drudge leads to dumbing down. And that is probably exactly why it goes wrong, when we let people work 80 hours a week. Especially if in those 80 hours everything is directed at the same goal. People become blind for problems and loose the ability to solve those problems, they might be aware of, but do not see.
And that is something you also could read in the story of king Midas, keep your life in balance.
September 23rd, 2008 at 7:12 am
@Norman Dragt: Thanks for your comment, Norman. Some good points here. I certainly agree that all too many people—and not only workaholics—believe their personal worth resides in what they own (homes, cars, personal wealth of all kinds), not in who and what they are. As a result, such peple are often rich in ‘things’ and poor in character and personal qualities.
Keep reading, my friend.