Just So by Alan Watts

Author:Alan Watts
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781683642954
Publisher: Sounds True
Published: 2020-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

Money and the Good Life

The fact that we in the West are obsessed with abstract attainments goes back to curious factors in our history regarding money and caste. You might already be familiar with the castes originating in ancient India, the Brahmins (priests, theologians, and intellectuals), Kshatriyas (warriors and rulers), Vaishyas (farmers and merchants), Shudras (blue-collar workers), and Dalits (the untouchables). We don’t like to admit it, but these castes are perennial — that is, they still exist in our societies today. You’ve got professors and businesspeople and laborers and your typical American fraternity sort with his crew cut who loves alcohol and football and so on. It’s all there.

In the sixteenth century, something curious happened in Europe during the Reformation — the Vaishyas got the upper hand on the Brahmins and Kshatriyas. The feudal aristocracy began to lose power to the great merchant bankers of Italy and the burghers of Central Europe, and the Roman Catholic Church began to lose power because its doctrine was criticized and fell under increasing suspicion. Protestantism was a creation of the burgher cities of Europe — places like Geneva, Frankfurt, London, Edinburgh, and so on. As a consequence, money values began to dominate Christian theology. The number of holy days were cut down by all Protestant sects because the merchants didn’t want their workers taking all of these holidays off. The Protestant ethic places great value on the virtues of saving and frugality, which are essentially Vaishya ideas run wild.

This is where the United States inherited its basic conception of the good life. It’s largely the creation of bourgeois Protestantism, which is why we have a bad relationship with the material present. Our whole world is based on two contradictory ideas: First, save up; put your money aside and invest it. Second, happiness comes from buying things.

When people feel inadequate, bored, or unfulfilled, a great number of them try to rid themselves of the sensation by spending their money. Some people even use the entire day to go shopping — it’s considered the thing to do. Go out and shop all day and come home loaded with all kinds of things. Unfortunately, these things are not true material possessions — most of them are poorly made, and you can’t use so many things in your home in the first place. You can store them and show them to your friends, but even if you own six houses, you can only live in one at a time. And it’s the same with horses or cars — unless you’re performing some sort of circus act, you can only ride one at a time. Even so, we tend to become absolutely overloaded with possessions and have difficulty moving around, because every time we move we have to carry all this heavy stuff with us — oversized chairs and other huge things. They’re the perfect pest — we have to use our muscles to lug them around, they have to be cleaned, and moths have to be kept out of them.

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