The Anatomy & Meaning of Wealth

We will not have any good answer, no matter how we try, to explain the meaning of life and everything associated with it, such as wealth or lack of it, let alone to expound on the true meaning of riches and to defining what it is like to be truly wealthy. We will see that people in the plains of Mongolia or those at the base of the Himalayas have a different definition of what the Swedes or Norwegians have in mind; a hot shot trader in Wall Street sees wealth through a different prism from the sidewalk vendor whose take home income for the evening is as little as a tiny microbe inside the gut of a cow as to the trader’s 12 oz. steak consumed in one dinner.  As sloppy as that metaphor seems to be, we are immediately taken to the discussion of income inequality or the glaring disparity brought on by wealth inequality.  Do we have anywhere near the answer to that? Or, is that even the right away to view it. 

  

First, if it is not yet clear to anyone at all, equality when it comes to income or accumulated wealth does not exist anywhere in the world.  Socialism, even in its truest form – the utopian dream of those who profess equality among the citizens only succeeded to create dystopia instead.  Nothing can be a more glaring example than Mao’s great revolution which ultimately failed.  One visible flaw among many was a symbol of equality in what people wore, such as what the Mao jacket exemplified.  At one time it even became the toast of Western fashion designers (for those who remember). The Mao regime boasted that everyone in China at that time wore the same clothing, a sign of a homogeneous status where no one stood out to a different social class because everybody wore the same thing. There was Mao wearing the Mao jacket (or suit) along with a few hundred million people (the population was not quite a billion then).  What everyone in the West was not told was that 99.99 % of the Mao jacket was from coarse cotton while the top leaders of the Communist Party, including Mao, had silk or silk blended material for their version of the Mao jacket.  Fidel Castro’s green fatigues looked no different from what every military man wore in Cuba. What is not known is that Castro’s outfits were made from material likely of the quality Giorgio Armani would work with.  I remember too when the Nehru jacket was about as popular as the Mao version.  Well, there were those of fine linen and silk worn during the Oscars by Hollywood celebrities and the rest were those that adorned hotel door men and India’s lower middle class. Socialism and fervor towards income and wealth equality are often a façade replete with hypocrisy. There is a current senator who speaks so fervently about income inequality who owns three high end homes to his name, including a recently purchased winter house so he can ski right off the front door; another advocate of the working class has a net worth north of $20 M.

Equality of anything is incongruous with nature; the whole universe thrives in inequality. I’m going to be facetious here, for a moment, even though it is being truthful in a way. If we look around us, homogeneity is not the rule. There are tall trees, short ones, we have mountains, ordinary hills and mole hills, even penguins that look alike are not a homogeneous avian colony - which makes it possible for one penguin to distinguish its mate and chick from the others even after being away for three months to feed.  Is it fair to criticize an ant or termite colony when a good number of the species are workers, soldier/guards, nursery attendants and much of the food gathered goes to the queen and her developing larvae?  There is no equality in a wolf pack or pride of lions. I know some will push back with, “Those are animal species you’re talking about.”

Let’s talk about people, but first we must discuss geography.  Does equality mean we all should be living in the temperate zone where much of the wealthy nations are?  Should natural resources have been equally apportioned to each country?  As we can see immediately, no two nations are the same, every nation has its share of "haves and have nots". Here is a thought experiment. We give every person a hectare of land in a community. The parcels have the same exposure to sun and every cubic meter of soil is as fertile as the next one.  We know that after just a few seasons of planting and harvesting we will see different results.  Each land will produce differently and in no time incomes will be unequal, the wealth of each family will differ from the next one.

Let’s drill a little deeper while still being semi-facetious.  The universe is the way it is because of the lumpy, unequal distribution of matter.  The lumpiness of star distribution makes for the various shapes of galaxies; the uneven location of stars in the milky way put our sun’s orbit away from the violent roller derby at and near the center of the Milky Way; the unequal distribution of star dust during the birth of our solar system located earth at the most habitable distance from the sun for water molecules to generally remain in liquid form. The diversity among living organisms of fauna and flora is solely a matter of unequal traits and survival skills.  In fact, homogeneity in species is its death knell, because it is when the gene pool shrinks to a puddle.  These are just examples from which the reader is urged to expand one’s view of the unequal distribution in nature.  The point I am making here is that inequality is the universal law that governs all things from particles of matter to galaxy clusters and everything in between.  In fact, if it were not so, the universe may not exist all, or at least not in the form that it does now.

Diversity – another hallmark for the very same folks who clamor for income and wealth equality – is defined by unequal distribution of talent, skills, skin colors, eye shapes and tints, etc.  Inequality by birth, country of origin, differences in education, family background are the varied qualities that stoke the crucible from which exceptional people rise and flourish.  The pages of history are filled with great men and women who, despite the inequality of birth right, family wealth and income, went on to overcome such latent barriers of inconceivable odds working against them.    

Now, first we must answer, “What is wealth anyway?” We all know of people who went on to gather so much wealth only to lose everything in the end.  So we know wealth is temporary.  Sam Walton and Milton Hershey made and lost money a few times before getting it right, so we know wealth can be had, lost and can be found again. Wealth can outlive the people who accumulated it.  This brings us to one profound reality – no one yet had succeeded to take it with him or her past the threshold of the great beyond.  Wealth could be something else. Is it one to withstand the physical test for mere material possessions?  This led to an anonymous quote below:

 “You aren’t wealthy until you have something money can’t buy”.

Well, let’s add it to one of the definitions of wealth.  Wealth is something one has that money can’t buy; which brings us to a spectrum of priceless categories.  Is it health, happiness, simple pleasures, a sense of well-being? Now, we know wealth cannot be defined by a single characteristic.  It is also immeasurable because how do we value what is priceless.

“Wealth consists of not having great possessions, but in having few wants”.

-------Epictetus

Now, that last quote has far deeper meaning than, say, “Wealth gives us more options”, doesn’t it?

Believe it or not, the question is just as difficult to answer as the meaning of life.  Just think, while every other person has a different interpretation of what a good life is, or how it is lived, or how it should be lived, we are faced with the same conundrum with wealth.  We, for example, quickly find out that dollars and cents, a mansion or a shanty house, an upscale neighborhood versus the project, etc. lose all their meaning to anyone too sick to care or ponder the difference.  The cliché, “health is wealth”, takes us in no time to the realization that nothing else matters beyond a chronic illness, an inoperable cancer, or a bed-ridden existence. We’re cutting to the chase quickly here, so to speak, and there is a way to pose even more questions.  We hear laments about income inequality all the time recently, and wealth inequality becomes an even more intractable issue. Political debates and social discussions had been going on from since the beginning of civilization.  The debate continues; one musing will not give it any finality, nor do I have high expectations to change anyone’s mind but let’s get to a different way of asking and answering these questions.

I am certain, and many of you will agree, that some of our fondest memories and happiest recollections were those from our childhood. I grew up in a family that even by local third-world-country-standards was considered poor.  Looking at where I am now and where I came from, the difference in night and day will not sufficiently describe what separated the two conditions. Yet, catching mudfish and perch from a small and often stagnant pond or coming back with a more than usual collection of clams and small crabs just before the ebb tide bid farewell as the sea reclaimed the seashore, or flying a home-made kite on a warm summer afternoon, were memories I will not trade for anything – not even with remembering my first car, the first high end sound system, the fancy tools, etc.  That, right there, could very well be the difference between having wealth and simply having a wealth of happy memories.

We know there are happy people in Gabon, Africa or the interior shanties in Tondo, Manila.  People there are content merely to have what they need.

This takes us to one of the more meaningful quotes I had encountered.  The Rev. Billy Graham said:

“When wealth is lost, nothing is lost; when health is lost, something is lost; when character is lost, all is lost”.

That quote covers a lot, doesn’t it?  Does it explain everything? No, but it does show us the difference between what is briefly ephemeral, such as a bank account and every material possession we own, and what our loved ones, friends, and anyone who knows us, will remember us for.  It explains too that like everything that makes up the universe, all that is physical comes and goes, gets transformed from something to another over eons of time, without permanence or enduring existence.  Character lives on whether or not there are people to recognize or remember it. Nature or the Creator - for many of us who recognize that by faith – has seen to it that physical wealth is something everybody, without exception, leaves behind. Therefore, what we cannot take with us to wherever we are finally destined must not be that important.