Monday, January 29, 2007

Money and Power

I was looking up synonyms for love the other day - arguably one of the most important words in the English language. As a verb, the word has about 40. Money - our topic today on Thinking With Somebody Else's Head - has 56. (I didn't even bother looking up "love of money").

But whatever you call it - bucks, green, or bread - money today is so revered there's really only one appropriate synonym ... the almighty dollar.

Our topic today is an important one, and we're going to try to look at money in ways you may not have considered before.

I'll be talking today with Dr. Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco, a psychoanalyst and vice-president of the International Society of Analytical Trilogy in São Paulo. Our discussions today will be based on Dr. Norberto Keppe's extraordinary book, Liberation of the People: The Pathology of Power. The book is an in depth and incisive psychological critique of money and power which reaches to the very root cause of our inverted and seriously pathological society and power structures.

It's essential reading, and I have some copies in English to give away to the first 25 people who email me at rich@richjonesvoice.com. Send me your name and mailing address and I'll let you know how you can get your copy.

A couple of weeks ago, we began the exploration of money in our program about Adam Smith. Today, let's go deeper into this area that impacts us all so deeply. Our society is dominated by it.

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Click here to read the transcript.
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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I enjoyed the podcast, finally got to hear it! Thanks!

jc said...

"So you think that money is the root of all evil?Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?" -Ayn Rand

A very wise quote. It comes out of her book "Atlas Shrugged." Anyone interested in these podcasts ought to read this book. And by the way the way her name was pronounced on the Adam Smith episode is wrong. It is pronounced as "eye" with "n" added to it.

Richard Lloyd Jones said...

Hey JC. Nice to see you posting some comments. Thanks.

I'm not quite sure of your point, though. Are you using Ayn Rand's quote to suggest that our Podcast was saying that money was evil? There is nowhere in the program where we say that.

The points this Podcast is making have to do with the inversion in society that forces people to work only for money, like money is the most important thing in the world, when it's far from that. Money is a terrible motivation for people to do something good and creative and beautiful, because those things come from the human essence, from human values and dignity and idealism. The point is that money is put first in our inverted society, and people last.

Our current economic system is destroying the world, so if we don't begin to look at this in a new light, we're in big trouble. I don't see anything in Ayn Rand's work that will help us in this situation, but lots in Keppe's work that will.

Thanks again for listening.

Richard