The Tenth Commandment
Because of my limited life experience, I could never fully appreciate the tenth commandment when I was going to Hebrew School (yes, I know I don't look Jewish):
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's.
More recently, I've realized the importance of this commandment, but at the same time, the difficulty of achieving it. It is hard to consistently not value what other people value. In American society, having material wealth is valued to an extreme level along with things like beauty and power. People seem to pursue material wealth in the following ways:
- Blindly with a willingness to sacrifice a lot of things in their own life and other people's lives to achieve it.
- Willfully ignorantly (I couldn't remember the actual phrase for this so I made one up), like when a person knows the ending to the movie, but still wants to watch it anyway. In the same way, people want material wealth to reassure themselves that they didn't really need it after all.
- Altruistically, with the sole purpose of helping others.
- Competitively, to just have more than others.
- Fearfully, to avoid being broke and/or be financially free.
All of this can be applied to economic theory. If somebody has two widgets, they may be very happy. However, if they learn about people with more than that, their happiness goes down even though they still have two widgets. When a whole society values widgets, it is extremely hard to resist valuing them even if they lose practical value once you have a lot of them. Sure, one can go through spurts, but when somebody is constantly surrounded by people who value having lots of widgets, it is hard not to value them as well (at least in the back of your mind).
This extremely powerful concept applies to all levels of society, not just people with less of what everybody values. For example, I remember watching an interview with Ted Turner, one of the richest men in the world, talking about how he wanted to move up in the rankings of the world's richest people.
In the past I've dismissed the power of this force, but being constantly confronted with it, I can appreciate its power. Some questions we must ask ourselves are:
- Should I spend my whole life resisting what other people value, when what they value doesn't seem to have a practical purpose?
- Should I go along with the flow and find ways to make the most out of going with the flow (ie - using money and power to help others)?
- Should I move somewhere else and/or only surround myself with people who value what I want to value?
- Is there a very powerful way to neutralize the power of the force on a consistent basis?