The

The Veritable Counsel

In a post truth reality of negotiated identities, mental health is the only truth out there.

The Money Sickness

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It is my hypothesis that large amounts of money available to an individual, group, or family, contributes to a kind of insanity that I called “the money sickness”.

The money sickness is a type of mental disorder where and ability to wield a disproportionately large amount of power allows the individual to no longer have to adhere to the social ideological structures which insure group safety and social cohesion.

This safety and cohesion contributes to the health of society through cognitive structures that we know as religion science and cultural norms.



27 responses to “The Money Sickness”

  1. Jon Awbrey Avatar
    Jon Awbrey

    The critical part of the analysis begins in the section on Calvinism.

    Weber • Chapter 4 • The Religious Foundations of Worldly Asceticism

    In its extreme inhumanity this doctrine must above all have had one consequence for the life of a generation which surrendered to its magnificent consistency. That was a feeling of unprecedented inner loneliness of the single individual. In what was for the man of the age of the Reformation the most important thing in life, his eternal salvation, he was forced to follow his path alone to meet a destiny which had been decreed for him from eternity. No one could help him. No priest, for the chosen one can understand the word of God only in his own heart. No sacraments, for though the sacraments had been ordained by God for the increase of His glory, and must hence be scrupulously observed, they are not a means to the attainment of grace, but only the subjective externa subsidia of faith. No Church, for though it was held that extra ecclesiam nulla salus in the sense that whoever kept away from the true Church could never belong to God’s chosen band, nevertheless the membership of the external Church included the doomed. They should belong to it and be subjected to its discipline, not in order thus to attain salvation, that is impossible, but because, for the glory of God, they too must be forced to obey His commandments. Finally, even no God. For even Christ had died only for the elect, for whose benefit God had decreed His martyrdom from eternity. This, the complete elimination of salvation through the Church and the sacraments (which was in Lutheranism by no means developed to its final conclusions), was what formed the absolutely decisive difference from Catholicism.

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    1. landzek Avatar
      landzek

      Intresting. So are you saying that money fills in for the “lack of Being saved”?

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      1. Jon Awbrey Avatar
        Jon Awbrey

        I think the logic is vaguely abductive.
        The Elect Will Prosper.
        If I Prosper I Can Assuage My Fears Of Perdition.

        It does not follow, of course, nor can any amount of power and wealth fill the psychological-spiritual void, hence the insatiability of the “search for glory”, in Karen Horney’s phrase.

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      2. landzek Avatar
        landzek

        That is interesting.
        My point , though , is that the more freedom and resources one (money and power) has there is a tendency to become insane.

        What I mean by this is that insanity does not mark an absolute situation. There is no “naturally sane“ human being, and then some human beings who are insane. What is sane and insane is culturally mediated. But, where once there was actual cultures, many individual human cultures that were separate from one another but that which interface along lines of culture, to this define culture, that is, to that let us know of this thing called culture, now there is really a “global culture“ within which are a bunch of factions that like to believe they are a separate or unified or distinct group.

        One could say that the delineation of pure human group distinction by skin color is the last resort, the final way that human beings are still attempting to retain some thing that we once called culture. since really culture is just a way of saying I identify with this group of people, but I really have no way of finding out what really defines this group of people. In the past, by contrast, I had a very easy way of finding out what culture was: it was “them“, not us. Truly, distinctly, without any question. It was the Israelites, where are the Chinese, or the Mongolians, or the whatever it was. Each group knew their group from the next. It had nothing to do with definition or identity or any of those kind of modern idealized definitions that we want to hang on so dearly nowadays.

        Anyways…

        I would say that it is culture which defines what is sane and insane, but it is only our particular culture of modernity, at that a global maternity, which defines ultimately what is sane in insane. Despite what we wanna say about everyone gets to believe what they want, it is pretty much an undisputed fact that the ways of science, whatever we want to know and call science, has reached in to every corner of the globe and every community.

        More in a mints….

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      3. landzek Avatar
        landzek

        …ok

        My point.

        It seems when I say “the money sickness“, automatically we think something bad, something ethically wrong, something like evil or corrupt or looming. As if people suddenly get greedy and start to do terrible things and that is the money sickness.

        Yes, OK, I get that I can understand that yes it happens OK.

        That’s not really what I’m saying.

        I’m not saying that Money makes people corrupt. I’m saying that Money makes people lose their mind.

        People who have high anxiety and they can’t go out in public are not evil. They’re not bad people.

        People who are unable to have healthy relationships. Perhaps there is domestic violence or emotional abuse. Or even the targets of that abuse, who get traumatized and start to think less of themselves and become suicidal. Those people are not evil or bad. They’re not corrupt.

        And I might even go so far to say, if I may, that is soon as I say mental illness, it appears that the automatic thought that some people are having is that it’s evil. As a budding counselor, that is the stigma which perpetuates and indeed aggravates the mental health problem, the mental health crisis that we’re having right now in our society, and addiction as well. Just because there’s such an automatic stigma placed upon people who aren’t this “ethically good”. It’s not difficult to think that someone who does heroin is evil or morally bad or that they’re addicted because they just want to get high and that they’re lazy and they’re just bad people. That is a stigma.

        And I did actually this phenomenon of mental health stigma really goes to my point, and you and I have to say Maylynne oh, really kind of just exemplify my point.

        Because both of you automatically thought of how money corrupts with the title “the money sickness”. You both went to some sort of unspoken evil.

        And my point is really the opposite of that, the opposite condition. Which is that if people have a healthy relationship with money or they are not super rich then they are “good and sensible“.

        My point goes to how the concept of money is aligned with our concept of ethics, which further aligns with our concept of mental health and mental illness. And buy a not too far extension, intelligence and reason.

        My point is that the more money a person has, the more resources they do have, whether or not they consciously wield their power for good or bad, loosens an individuals necessity, or connection to what is, what we know as being human, which I am equating now to the “global human culture”. I’m not placing any inherent or automatic ethical components upon what I’m saying here except what I specifically distinguish. I’m not saying that simply because a person has more money they become evil, but I am saying that the more money a person has the further they embody a necessity to be in joined with the “regular people“ of the every day. They basically step outside of the true ethical human culture.

        But, because they wield so much power through the money that they have, people automatically assume that sentences they put together makes sense and reflect intelligence. Where as if someone was homeless, and said the same statements, people were probably wouldn’t give them a second thought, or the thought that they would give them would be that these people are insane. Not because they’re homeless, because actually we give people of poor stature more benefit of doubt when listening to them, we have more concern for them ethically. People who are super wealthy, we don’t really have any ethical consideration of them except that somehow we wish that we could have as much money that they have. And so one could say, one could make the argument that the more wealthy a person is, the less they are really seen for what they are representing, the more their words have weight even if they are filled with nonsense.

        I am saying that even people who think themselves good, because they have a lot of money and a lot of resources, can still be insane, at that, due to the amount of money that they have an amount of resources that they’re used to.

        They have a money sickness. And it is particular to those who have a lot of money or who were raised with a lot of money. They may be good people and give it to charitable organizations and whatever, but When you start to talk to them, when you start to dig beneath the social for sod and the glamour of money, And you really listen to what they’re talking about, they’re actually schizophrenic. They’re actually making no sense at all. But that the sense that I’m granting that they’re making, is just me involved in an ethical view about what it is to be human.
        Where I think it’s much more true and ethical to say Gwyneth Paltrow, Elon musk, Donald Trump, a number of other people who I like and dislike, because they have a lot of money and resources have been affected in such a way that they have become schizophrenic, that what they say actually has no sensible meaning.

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      4. landzek Avatar
        landzek

        I always understood the Protestant Ethic as: prosperity is the evidence that I am in Gods favor, good and ethical, that I am right. And then the opposite also: poverty=sloth=sin=fault.

        I like your other reply; I see it as explaining the historical context as nevertheless a condition of dynamic existence: the divorce from the Catholic (true United) faith amounts to a basic meaning for the Protestant: to an empty sense of belief that is filled by a ‘worldly evidence’, a new way to fill the imperative for meaning which could grant us purpose in the world that has been taken away from the unitive-love-Grace teleological equation of Catholicism: aka more money is evidence that I am doing right by God. Before, the church itself as a vehicle of Gods word and law supplied the needed teleology.

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  2. Jon Awbrey Avatar
    Jon Awbrey

    Max Weber got to the root of what makes this need insatiable in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

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    1. landzek Avatar
      landzek

      I’m familiar with it. But my opinion is from a health of the psyche (mental health) standpoint. If we are going to solve the problem of the modern individual, we can no longer ethically uphold the notion that every individual “does the same thing” when they think. We need consider that a spontaneous ability of human consciousness to make meaning, on a whole species level, is not sufficient to find individuals who are thinking. That is, for example, Musk dude is not thinking when he says that stuff in the link. He is not a thinker. What he is doing is something else. His brain is doing something, and his mouth producing sounds that appear to others as having sense. But it is really evidence of no sense, of his process occurring outside of what thought is.

      It is insanity. Like when you encounter some one who is in psychosis or has schizophrenia. You can only imagine if you have never encountered such a person.

      You try to talk with them or try to pull some underlying sense about what they are saying or doing, and after a while you realize that there is none. That it is only you making sense, or attempting to, out of what they say, like trying to help them through their confusion. But It is a pure confusion. In fact, in truth, it is not even confusion Becuase they will not have an ability to understand or conceive of what confusion is; Becuase they are not confused: they are not thinking. Neurons are firing, words and sentences are coming out of thier mouths, but there is nothing there, only random occurrences of sounds that sound like words that make sense to us.

      I am suggesting that we be able to discern a continuum of sense and nonsense upon an ethical parameter. To see that indeed all of us are merely firing sounds and gestures. But that what we include as sane and ethical we get to define along reasonable lines; this as opposed to just “everyone is human and justified as such against a ‘natural’ ability that all humans have, given certain educations, interventions and accommodations.

      I’m am suggesting that we are traumatized as a world culture from the modern industrial era of authoritarianism and absolutism that prevents us from
      Asserting an actual and real universal ethics.

      We have to grow up. Accept our adolescence. And move on.

      😆.

      Yes Weber has a point, but now his point showcases evidence. As opposed to an argument suspended in time. His represents a particular moment in the development of the modern human being. I’d say.

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    2. landzek Avatar
      landzek

      Hey. But I don’t remember what he talked about As the root of the insatiable ness ?

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  3. landzek Avatar
    landzek

    Anyways, I think the idea that there is an infinite human potential and ability to make meaning, and that all this type of meaning should be cultivated and considered, contributes To the crumbling of the good society.

    And I mean this in the sense of sanity. But also in the sense of ethics.

    My question: how much money does a person have to make to be content or satisfied?

    Here is my friend who makes $4 million and can pretty much do anything he wants whenever he wants, aside from that he loves his work and also has to work.

    And I think he is almost insane because He does not need to adhere to what makes actual cents. He has the resources and ability just in his way of life to make as much sense out of anything he wants, and then also, that people will believe him.

    My point is that at some point he’s making no sense at all, but because he has so much money and power, no one will check him. Actually people will still enforce him and support him, thinking that his nonsense is actually something super intelligent that they are just not able to understand.

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  4. maylynno Avatar
    maylynno

    I live in a country where everyone has the money sickness! If only you know the amount of corruption there is over here among governors, you would go crazy!

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    1. landzek Avatar
      landzek

      Yeah. It’s kind of sucky when you think about it, but I came up with this idea of “the money sickness“ due to my wife and her side of the family. Lol

      I posted the link because here is the Tesla dude seemingly evidencing the same type of craziness that I have noticed in my wife side of the family with certain people, but this also just a general noticing of a particular kind of reasoning that seems to be associated with having lots of money.

      I think it has to do with privilege, and I think it Hass to do with not having to give a shit about what regular people give a shit about. And I wonder, yes corruption, but also I mean it and get the kind of real or pure sense of insanity.

      Because, take for example the link.

      Setting aside the green maybe. Tesla dude is making comments on social media which, for anyone who has any Kind of consciousness which we call sane, would have to notice makes no sense at all.

      It is not just that he’s ignorant, and it is not just that he doesn’t care, and I don’t think it’s really that he’s greedy.

      I see it more as an indication of what the mind needs in order to function properly and healthily, at least in the context of understanding that you are not a human being alone, that you were not really an individual; or, maybe more precisely, it is a kind of individualism over the top, a kind of pure belief in One Self and self-centeredness.

      I threw around a post I don’t know a year ago maybe, just put out a question about The amount of money that a person needs to make to be content or happy.

      I’ll give you an example:
      A very good friend of mine makes probably over $4 million a year. now, before I met this guy, I had certain opinions about people who were very wealthy. When I met him and became friends with him, I was kind of taken back, because he was very nice and down to earth and genuinely warm and concerned for people. He’s a doctor and genuinely wants to help people and benefit mankind. But what struck me was that he was just really a regular human being who really had no pompous demeanor or anything that if I met him on the street I would be able to tell that he was super rich.

      Here is a guy that basically works his entire waking hours in the service of trying to help people and figuring out big problems of wholeness health and individual issues but also he likes to make a lot of money. He’ll work 80-90 hour weeks at a time for 2-months four months, and then all of a sudden just decide that he’s going to go to Europe or something for a week. Or that he’s going to go to Vegas and gambling whatever, or go down to Cabo. At any moment, he can decide to buy pretty much anything. And without even thinking about it. This was a kind of life completely foreign to me, and I still can’t really comprehend the life that he has the life that he lives. He basically can do whatever he wants. He’ll drop $10,000 on a bet for a football game, And if he wins then he’s happy and if he loses he’s kind of like, damn it they lost.

      More….

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      1. landzek Avatar
        landzek

        Ok..

        I don’t bear this guy any grudges whatsoever. Namely because I can’t imagine myself ever wanting to do the things that he does. He wakes up in the morning at 45 in the morning, maybe has a jujitsu instructor one day, a yoga instructor the next day, may be mixed martial arts, maybe just a workout partner. Then he has a personal chef who makes meals for him. So, if he wants breakfast, there’s probably something made for him from the previous day for him to eat breakfast, but I think he mostly just drinks nutrition drinks for breakfast probably. Then he does his rounds. And then maybe that week he goes to a speaking engagement at a university, or does some lectures. Maybe he has a meeting about a device that he’s patenting. And then he’s running his own business so then maybe he’ll drop by his business and talk to some of the famous and semi famous people and make sure that they’re taken care of maybe works out with them maybe he consults them on their nutrition or their physiology.

        I don’t know if he has driven or not. I don’t even care. All I know is there is no way that I would ever want to live the life that he is living. So I am OK with him living it.

        —-

        My point though, is that he makes around $4 million a year, and he basically lives the life that he wants to live, buys the things he wants to buy, does what he wants whenever he wants pretty much.

        And after knowing him for a couple years, I started thinking about the fact that he only makes $4 million a year. And he can do and buy whatever he wants whenever he wants.

        And I thought about the fact that for wealthy people, he’s probably at the lower end of the moneymaking spectrum. And so I pondered something else….

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      2. maylynno Avatar
        maylynno

        I get what you are saying but in my head wealthy doesn’t mean bad or shallow. As much as poor doesn’t mean nice. Good people and bad people exist everywhere and it has nothing to do with the financial background.

        However, wealthy are seen as selfish and bad due to a long christian morals tradition. Also because 10000$ which seems to both of us a big amount of money is not really to your rich doctor. Same goes for 10$ to you as not a big amount but big enough for the homeless down the street.

        The money sickness (i love this concept) is not about being wealthy. It is about the idea that everything is buyable/saleable, including human mind, dignity, organs.. just about anything. This mentality is doing us so much harm from climate change to wars. We know it over here that the US and some allies create wars to sell weapons. This is the money sick mind.

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      3. landzek Avatar
        landzek

        I’m not appealing to normal ethics. I’m saying that perhaps if someone feels they need to make more than, say—- what? How much shal we define? 15million? Let’s say 100million. Per year. Then they are insane. They actually have a mental disorder. Lol.

        I’m sure the drug cartels head is not evil. Or necessarily bad. I’m sure they love thier family and only want good for thier children. And would do anything for them. But. They are insane. Could be Same with a Wall Street investor that makes 500 million dollars? If they argue that humans should be free to pursue wealth beyond a certain point and they don’t want to given the rest back or something. We could say that defines a kind of mental illness. In the same way that we define “if you stay in bed and are not moot is Ted even to take a shower for weeks in end” a mental illness.

        For. Don’t we know that ethics as well is not based in any sure standard but only the belief that the discourse which defines them is? Once we own our psychology as a human culture. Then we are free to make such decisions. We get to then define who is not human. Since human is an arbitrary category as well.

        And I’m giving the benefit : at 4 million someone can do anything they want whenever. So let’s say if you have to make make more than 50 million then you are mentally sick and an intervention needs to happen. Just like any other acute illness.

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      4. maylynno Avatar
        maylynno

        Lol yes.. what do they do with all that money anyway!

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      5. landzek Avatar
        landzek

        …I’m saying more that a persons mind gets sick when they have too much freedom and resource. And that a ‘natural’ want to pursue such freedom And resource is signs of mental illness. Maybe. Like addiction.

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      6. landzek Avatar
        landzek

        …but the way to look at it is more like schizophrenia. That they simply are not thinking. And are not making sense.

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      7. maylynno Avatar
        maylynno

        And they have a distorted view of reality

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      8. landzek Avatar
        landzek

        Now that humanity is trying to become one big happy (but dysfunctional) family, we get to own our abilities and ethics. And define who is sane and who we need no longer hear as though they are saying something intelligent. We get do define ethically (Kierkegaard) what is psychologically Sound. We already do this. But we still see the categories as indicating something ‘natural’. Nature is discourse. We as a group are able to ethically decide what is natural.

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      9. landzek Avatar
        landzek

        …I saying we can intensionaly and together. Make our world. We are beginning to do this. But I am also saying that this intension would define insanity as a determined money amount. Not that evil people abuse power. Rather That if a person “behaves in a certain manner” the They are insane. Sick. If they behave as though they have a right to a make more than 500million, And move to do so, Then they are de facto mentally ill. Unstable. Needing of intervention.

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      10. maylynno Avatar
        maylynno

        I agree and so many of us, the big majority, suffer from these lunatics

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      11. landzek Avatar
        landzek

        ..and I’m also saying that a person can be nice and a good person, and due to thier making a lot of money also be mentally ill. In need of treatment. Due to. Just as abuse can lead to ptsd. Too much money can lead to schizophrenia. It’s just in how we view what’s occurring.

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      12. landzek Avatar
        landzek

        … it kind just verifies D and G in a very real way! 😆

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      13. maylynno Avatar
        maylynno

        Totally 🤣👌

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  5. Jon Awbrey Avatar
    Jon Awbrey

    Videque Moneytheism

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    1. landzek Avatar
      landzek

      I remember in the late 80s I worked at a bookstore. One of my first jobs. There was a book, I don’t remember the name of the book but it was something like “the book of money”, or “money Bible”.

      I knew I should’ve got it at the time because it was like the coolest thing in the stupidest thing and the lamest thing all wrapped together. Like a symbol of pure irony.

      I’ve tried to Google it to see if I could find it and I haven’t found it.

      But, it was basically a book that was put together like the Bible. With different books, and chapters and it looked the same as typical Bibles. But all the stories were changed into stories about money or context of money. And it was so overkill it was ridiculous. Being that it was the 80s there was an infatuation with greed and just money for the sake of money and he who dies with the most toys wins, and shit like that. And like the book of Genesis started with like “in the beginning was money”. And then I remember like the one that was like Psalm 23 or something, the whole chapter was “money, money money money money money, money money money. “ but written in the same phrasing as the 23rd Psalm. And the whole thing was like that with all the different books of the Bible but it was all about money and just ridiculously comic and ironic and yet somehow sad at the same time. I knew I should’ve bought the book when I saw it but it was like $35 and I think I was like 17 years old and that seems like a lot of money in the late 80s. Lol

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