The principle of love advises us to tune in and connect with the concept of money on a deeper level, so let’s do exactly that and see what the process reveals.
There are two ways to earn money:
1. Make a meaninful social contribution, and receive payment commensurate with the social value of your contribution.
2. Take advantage of market inefficiencies to extract money without contributing any substantial value.
The first option includes getting a job and performing useful work, running a business that provides valuable products or services, reselling items with value added, or investing in any of these outlets. The second option includes gambling, begging, criminal activities, buying and reselling items with no added value, or investing in any of these.
Here’s another way of labeling these two strategies:
- Contribute
- Mooch
Unless you’ve somehow opted out of the monetary system, you’re using one or both of these earnings strategies right now. However, one of them will likely be dominant in your life. Either you’re creating genuine social value and being fairly compensated for it, or you’re mooching off the value created by others.
Note that contribution is essential for the monetary system to survive and thrive, but mooching is not. The only way moochers can survive is by extracting value from contributors. But ultimately someone must contribute, or there can be no value for the moochers to extract. Unless you’ve found a way to be completely self-sufficient, you’re always extracting some value from society, such as your food, clothing, and shelter. The question is whether you’re feeding fair value back into the system to compensate for what you’re pulling out.
Some degree of mooching is to be expected. Children mooch off their parents. Those who are unable to contribute mooch off those who can. Whenever we enjoy the fruits of someone else’s labor without paying for it, we’re mooching. We all mooch off the hard work of our ancestors. But eventually we must decide whether we’ll continue down that path or begin making a genuine contribution.
Obviously, your life will include some contribution and some mooching, but what’s your primary income-generating strategy? Do you contribute real social value, or do you mooch off the value of other contributors? Take note that if you work for a larger organization, you share in their income-generating strategy as well. Are you working for a moocher or a contributor? The big picture can’t be ignored.
Opting in to mooch mode means you’re extracting more social value than you’re contributing. Your focus is on getting as opposed to giving, so you take more out of the system than you give back. The moocher mind-set suggests you can always rely on others to pick up your slack. It’s the attitude of unearned entitlement. Since you still need to extract value such as food, clothing, and shelter—value others must provide for you—you live at the expense of others. Your burden may be shouldered by a willing individual such as a parent, or it may be shared by society at large; either way you survive by suckling the social teat.
Sometimes mooching becomes so habitual that it’s easy to overlook. Many people who think of themselves as working in contributioin-based careers harbor an underlying moocher mind-set. They aim to extract more social value than they actually contribute. This includes the attorney who records more billable hours than were actually worked, the CFO who fudges the numbers to inflate a company’s stock price, and the employee who performs personal tasks while on the clock. Such actions are unbecoming of genuine contributors.
Another name for the moocher mind-set is the scarcity mind-set. Since you aren’t creating value of your own, the money you extract must come from someone else. It’s a zero-sum game. Whatever you gain, someone else must lose.
The moocher mind-set makes the attainment of financial abundance very difficult because in order to succeed financially with this worldview, you must embrace certain values that most folks would consider negative. Your gain is someone else’s loss, so getting rich requires taking advantage of people. In order to gain by mooching, someone else must cover your extraction with real value. The more wealth you accumulate, the more you take from others, and the more you force others to pick up your slack. Consequently, mooching is essentially the same thing as theft.
Most people can’t handle the thought of becoming wealthy at the expense of others, so the moocher mind-set frequently gives rise to self-sabotage. If you fall into this pattern, you’ll experience a love/hate relationship with money. On the one hand, you may want more money, but on the other hand, you’ll probably feel disinclined to do what it takes to get it, since you know that the more wealth you acquire through such means, the more someone else has to pay for it.
For example, if you make a living as a professional poker player, then you know that the more you earn, the more money others must lose, and somewhere down the line, someone must provide real value to cover the cash you’re extracting. This isn’t the best motivation for a highly conscious person to achieve financial abundance. In order to make money this way, you must disconnect from your true self and put up walls that disconnect you from others.
Some people bypass this problem of financial self-sabotage by lowering their consciousness and turning away from the principle of love. They learn to make money while numbing themselves to the full consequences of how they’re earning it. They invent justifications to explain their actions while shrinking their awareness in order to avoid connecting with the truth. For example, a car salesman may generate extra commissions by overpricing cars for unwary customers, but in so doing, the salesman denies himself the opportunity to form honest, loving connections with those customers. By embracing the moocher mind-set, he falls out of alignment with the principle of love.
A small percentage of people are able to adopt the moocher mind-set without lowering their awareness. They skew the principle of love in the direction of self-love, essentially rejecting the principle of oneness along with its virtues of empathy, compassion, honesty, fairness, contribution, and unity. This is the mind-set of career criminals who intentionally harm others for personal gain.
Unless you’re able to completely suppress your conscience, the moocher mind-set makes financial abundance incompatible with conscious living. This is the mind-set that leads you to ask: How can I get more money? instead of How can I contribute more value? The more conscious and loving you become, the more you’ll hesitate to increase your income through such means, since your gain is someone else’s loss. Consequently, those who adopt the moocher mind-set often succumb to financial self-sabotage. The solution is either to suppress your conscience or to drop the moocher mind-set and lovingly embrace the contributor mind-set.
* Source: Personal Development for Smart People by Steve Pavlina