Why The Love Of Money Is The Root Of All Evil

Running head: THE LOVE OF MONEY 1

Why the Love of Money is the Root of all Evil

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THE LOVE OF MONEY 2

Why the Love of Money is the Root of all Evil

Money is a practical necessity in any advanced society. Beyond facilitating routine

economic transactions, money also enables the coordination of disparate economic activities

within a complex framework of labor division. Economists posit that a society without money

cannot advance beyond elemental agrarianism (Sowell, 2007). Despite its unarguable

importance, the invention of money 6000 years ago (Sowell, 2007) introduced ethical questions

that modern societies still grapple with. The desire to acquire money and its trappings has proved

overwhelming for many people, causing corruption, betrayal, environmental destruction, moral

decay, the disintegration of families, and war. The saying that “the love of money is the root of

all evil” is a longstanding, universal acknowledgment of the pernicious moral effects of an

unchecked pursuit of money and material holdings.

Although this saying appears most explicitly in the Christian scriptures (1 Timothy 6:10,

The New King James Version), the oral and written literature of many ancient societies suggests

that they recognized the insidious moral consequences of servitude to money. Three thousand

years before apostle Paul of Tarsus condemned the love of money in his letter to Timothy (1

Timothy 6, The New King James Version), an ancient Phoenician proverb warned that a person

who sets his heart on money finds it, but loses his heart (Sandel, 2013). Likewise, the ancient

occupants of modern France advised that money is a good servant, but a bad master. The

common thread in these quotes is the recognition that the pursuit of money is liable to corrupt

people’s hearts and values. When human beings devote themselves to money, their ethical values

become secondary. Inevitably, the pursuit of money leads people to ethically unscrupulous

actions.

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It is important to note that the foregoing injunctions against the love of money do not

only refer to the love of currency. Rather, ‘money’ is a metaphorical representative of material

wealth in its various forms. Money is valued, not as an end in itself, but as a means to an end.

Money enables people to procure material riches, which in turn confer power, prestige, and

influence. When consumed by the desire to acquire material riches, human beings tend to employ

whatever means they deem necessary. Money normally lies at the center of fraternal disputes,

dysfunctional marriages, and a broad variety of crimes. It also lies at the heart of many of the

world’s conflicts, past as well as present (Sandel, 2013). In the name of money, people cheat,

kill, plunder, and destroy. Although human beings inherently recognize that these actions are

harmful and unethical, their desire for wealth numbs them to the consequences of their actions.

The love of money and material wealth renders conscientious individuals capable of committing

crimes and atrocities that they ordinarily would not commit. Societies have long recognized this

intoxicating effect of the love of material wealth and accordingly warned about it.

Apart from the harmful ramifications of the love of material holdings on an individual

level, preoccupation with temporal wealth also carries negative consequences on the broader

societal level. When a society prioritizes material holdings to the exclusion of ethical, aesthetic,

and cultural values, it impairs its ethical compass. A person’s success in such a society is

assessed on purely quantitative criteria, with no attention to the qualitative values that define

success. People are judged based on how much they take in, not by how much they give out.

This trend is easily observable in the contemporary world, where lists of the most successful

people tend to be duplicates of lists of the most wealthy. The conflation of wealth and success

creates a societal values system that tolerates immoral actions if they are oriented toward the

acquisition of wealth. Corruption, bribery, deceit, adultery, profiteering and other excesses are

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excused insofar as those who commit them are either wealthy or motivated by the pursuit of

wealth. In the final analysis, the prioritization of wealth systemically normalizes injustices and

impairs a society’s moral compass. The result is the creation of societies that are culturally,

spiritually, and morally bankrupt.

When Paul warned Timothy that “the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil,” he

was echoing the longstanding observations of countless societies before and after him. The love

of money and affluence is an intoxicating impulse that carries harmful ramifications, both on an

individual and societal level. In addition to precipitating evil and unethical actions directly, the

love of money also harms a society’s moral contours indirectly through the prioritization of

affluence and concomitant neglect of ethical values. In the final analysis, the love of money and

its trappings is the root of all kinds of evil.

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References

Sandel, M. (2013). What money can’t buy: The moral limits of markets. London: Penguin.

Sowell, T. (2007). Basic economics. New York: Basic Books.

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