Money, Freedom, and Desire - Essay Example

Money, Freedom, and Desire As modern Western human beings, it has been ingrained in the psyche that freedom is the state of life. Through ideologies that support the idea of freedom, humans in the Western cultures have convinced themselves that they are free. However, the definitions of freedom arch wildly from sphere to sphere, each community recognizing different forms and different constraints that are a threat. However, the concept of freedom does not exist, the human animal having physical needs that must be met, cognitive development that requires outside stimulation, and the need for socialization that is important to emotional development making human interaction vital for survival. The core of the modern world in regard to all of these aspects of life is money. Money provides the means through which humans socialize, fuel their physical needs, and exist within a framework conducive for learning. While freedom is a concept that human beings like to throw around through frameworks that suggest independence, the truth is that freedom does not exist as dependency on a variety of concepts must be initialized and maintained in order to survive. Georg Simmel, in his work The Philosophy of Money, discusses the concepts of freedom as it relates to interdependency in the modern context. The need for money becomes a central dependency from which all other dependencies are built. His discussion includes the contrast of modern man to primitive man, the focus being on the types of dependencies that primitive man in comparison to modern man. Primitive cultures had limited numbers of people through which they created their existence. A tribe may have 30 or 40 people, or maybe even more, but the number of people required to survive was a limited grouping. In this modern age, man requires the people who support the business for which they work, the patrons of that business, the grocery store system, the fuel system for vehicles, and so many large groups of people through whom needs are fulfilled that solitary freedom is near impossible to achieve. If these services were to break down, modern man would be at a loss to find a way to perpetuate his existence. The social lubricant that allows all of these systems to operate is money. Money is the currency that creates value exchange within these systems. The economic system is designed so that in exchange for work, rather than goods and services, money is given so that it can be exchanged for goods and services. It is the intermediary through which interactions and dependencies are created. The novel Madame Bovary: A Study of Provincial Life, Gustave Flaubert examines the many ‘needs’ that live within human existence. The first interdependency is shown through the social climbing that is done by Charles Bovary through his marriage to his first wife, then through his second wife Emma who turns towards desire and drama when her emotional needs are not fulfilled through a conventional life. Emma has fulfilled her basic needs and comforts, her needs for food and shelter beyond her worries. She is restless and feels that she is confined by the structures that have provided these basic needs. Her thoughts of freedom turn outside of her marriage, leading her to seek adventures of desire in order to feel that need to be free. She thinks “They ran back again to embrace once more, and then she promised him to find soon, by no matter what means, a regular opportunity for seeing each other in freedom at least once a week” (Flaubert and Ranous 270). In her conventional life, she was bound by its responsibilities and lack of emotional engagement, but through her indiscretions, she found moments of freedom. Through her desire to accumulate, to accumulate lovers, possessions, and luxuries, she fulfilled her need for freedom by creating surrogates for the emptiness that her normative life presented her. Mariama Ba discusses a similar theme in her work on marriage in Western Africa and the implications of a misogynist society on the freedoms of women. While Emma in Madame Bovary created her own sense of hell through an inability to be content within the framework of her marriage and life, Ramatoulaye, a widow in the period of required mourning after the death of her husband, writes to her friend about the experiences in her life. As the emotions of a lack of enthusiasm for life are described, Ba writes “My heart no longer beats wildly in the whirl of the spoken words. I am touched by the sincerity of words, but I am not carried away by it; my euphoria, born of the hunger and thirst for tenderness, fades away as the hours dance past” (66). Because desire, the need for a social fulfillment, is so dire for the human existence, freedom can be taken away when those needs are not fulfilled. Locked in a vice of alienation, no amount of money can release a person from the pain that can be a part of life. Simmel makes the distinction between independence and non-dependence. He states “If loneliness has a psychological reality and significance then it in no way refers merely to the absence of society but rather to its ideal” (2). The lack of ideal socialization creates a trap in which a human being suffers for his or her absence of fulfillment. The dependency upon economic structures falls well short of creating the interdependence that is needed for social satisfaction. It is possible, then that the use of money as an intermediary has put a divide between human beings, creating a separation that breaks down the essential need of community. Simmel discusses the nature of freedom as it relates to the social framework of existence. He suggests that “freedom means the development of individuality, the conviction to unfold the core of our being with all its individual desires and feelings”, thus relating freedom, not to the absence of relationships, but to the existence of specific relationships with the sphere of an individual (2). Just as Emma sought to engage the world through the framework of how she perceived fulfillment to exist on a social level, so too do all human beings yearn for the family, the marriage, or the community that represents freedom to them. It is not in the absence of connection that human beings find freedom; it is in the existence of connections that provide the context of freedom that humans thrive. Human relationships, according to Simmel, exist in a state of both closeness and distance. When distance maximizes and closeness wanes, loneliness is the result, locking the individual in a memory or imaginative construct of what the relationship should be, thus constraining freedom to experience life through the lens that socialization has developed within the person. How the person perceived their existence and what satisfaction means within that framework will define actions. As Ramatoulaye reflects on her life, she experiences the losses of her hopes and dreams as they were not reflected in the acts of betrayal that strips them from her. Through understanding the gap between expectation and experience, a person finds themselves understanding how their freedoms and constraints have been defined within their life. In her work of fiction, Pillars of Salt, Fadia Faquir discusses the fates of two women whose lives are stripped of freedom through misogynistic social settings. Patriarchal settings that are defined through colonialism and through the inequality of the genders create a community in which women can be manipulated into situations that deny them their freedoms without modern justification. In one section of the book, freedom is described as it is associated with connectivity. She writes “Every word he said, every move he made, brought more freedom and joy. My body grew lighter and lighter until I turned into an ostrich feather” (Faqir 52). This representation of how an emotion is broken free through the existence of another person within the social framework of an individual illustrates the way in which interconnectivity provides the greatest resource for true freedom. Poverty of the physical needs of life is nothing compared to poverty of the spirit. As an individual must navigate the continuing growth and development of their life, their interconnectivity will frame the successful nature of freedom that they experience. An example can be seen when one looks at the life of a woman who lives within the Islamic culture who embraces the tenets with which her religion imposes. The Western world often looks at her and thinks that she has no idea what true freedom is and is suffering from the oppression that exists with the inequality of genders. However, for many women who wear the veil and who live within the confines of their religious structure, they are content and happy, their family functioning comfortably and their connections to their husband, their children, and their community providing for all of the social freedom that they desire. The counterbalance of this, of course, is the powerlessness that she has in preventing events, such as those related by Faqir, from taking away the freedom that she experienced through the connectivity that she had to her community. This only works with those who have embraced the spirit of their community, rather than those who find moral and ethical discord within its structure. This does not only exist for women, but for men as well when the ideologies of their community come in conflict with a philosophical discovery that separates their beliefs from the structure of their social environment. Thus, what is right and what is free are not always connected, the social discourse on what defines freedom sometimes in conflict with the sense of freedom that an individual experiences with the social structuring of a community. Simmel continues his argument by contrasting the difference between a medieval vassal and a medieval serf. While the obligations of both roles are relatively the same, the vassal was free to change masters while the serf was enslaved. This essential theoretical freedom, whether or not the vassal used that freedom, created a socially identifiable difference. Contentment is independent of the identity of freedom. The vassal may stay in his service and be very discontent, while the serf may be comfortable in his service, despite his lack of freedom to exit his service. Freedom is a state of mind, not a state of existence. Though the lack of freedoms that exist for women in the Islamic religion provides a public context for oppression, this may not be how it is experienced. The ability to strip freedom from the oppressed, however, provides a context for bondage in which the power that is asserted has a primary function. Once again, money becomes a part of the discourse as it is more often the one who controls money that has the ability to strip the freedom that a person is experiencing. Through the understanding of the ideologies of separate spheres, the concept that is prevalent in many societies where men and women have roles in two separate worlds, the male world in the public sphere and the female world in the domestic sphere, the power follows the money and the money resides firmly in the public sphere. When Emma expresses her dissatisfaction in life by controlling the money in the household, she is taking hold of power in order to assert her sense of position within her world. As she spends extravagantly, she creates a sense of well-being, although short lived, as possession takes the place of self actualization. She identifies herself by her material goods, not wealth or social satisfaction, but through ’purchasing’ her identity. Emma is never free, even in the moments that she takes her choices towards morally and ethically unsound concepts such as adultery and over spending. These ’addictive’ ideas lock her out of true consciousness of spirit, her freedom bound to her ability to behave, rather than her ability to feel peace and freedom. Ramatoulaye, as well, is bound by her feelings about what she could not control as she feels betrayed by the actions of her husband. The temper of desire can provide freedom and can also constrain an individual from the freedom to feel content. Bound by social structures that demand certain behaviors, a person will feel disconnected and find that the distance in their relationships are maximized over the closeness, thus depriving them of the sustenance that relationships will provide to the spirit. Money is the social lubricant that connects people from their desires to fulfilling their needs; however, it also disconnects communities as it acts as an intermediary. Money, although often defined as a method of freedom, is merely a conduit which can constrain as much as it can provide freedom. It is only in understanding the nature of freedom, the mental state where peace and tranquility has released the individual from feeling that they are powerless to pursue their happiness, that true freedom can be discovered. Freedom, in the end, is a state of mind not a position in society. The roles that are created through employment, through gender identities, and through familial relationships create the structure of a life, but freedom is defined by a state of mind. Works Cited Ba, Mariama. So Long a Letter. London: Heinemann, 1989. Print. Faqir, Fadia. Pillars of Salt. New York: Quartet Books, 1996. Print. Flaubert, Gustave, and Dora K. Ranous. Madame Bovary: A Study of Provincial Life. New York: Brentano's, 1919. Print. Simmel, Georg. The Philosophy of Money. London: Routledge, 1978. Print. Read More