Exchange is the backbone of any intelligent civilisation. No one person has all the things he needs to sustain life. And with the advent of the modern era, things get even more complex. Exchange gets more complex. 

Because it’s not about the basic human needs anymore. It’s more about our desires and wants. A lot of things have been added to our lists, to “exchange”. The list is virtually non-ending given the commoditisation of everything we can think of. 

It all started out as a simple barter system in the beginning where only basic survival needs were exchanged between people. Slowly as the human race advanced, more varieties of the same began being exchanged. Then more unique items were added. 

Over thousands of years of advancement, we have settled on a common entity called money to serve all our exchange needs and to establish a just value for any given thing as opposed to the barter system where establishing the value of anything in terms of any number of other things was a nightmare. 

And thus was born, the monetary exchange system. The concept is quite simple really. Every thing is assigned a value in terms of money. If you have that particular amount of money, you can have that thing. If you don’t, you can’t. 

So, the system itself, makes it all about the money. And our predicament is such that we live in a world that is hellbent on trying to sell us stuff that we may or may not need. 

This has two implications. One, it unnecessarily increases our desires and wants. Second, it psychologically puts pressure on our minds that we need to be financially sound in order to be able to fulfil any desires we have or might have in the future. 

This makes hoarders out of us all. The hoarders of money!

If you look at the world and the current situation it is in at this time, it is of no surprise that much of this is due to money. How does a piece of paper manage to spread evil in the world? How does it make monsters out of humans? Let’s find out.

1. Greed

Usually what is seen in the world is, the more money a person has, the more he wants. For such people, it is an endless race. One with no finish line. That is because there is no limit to how much you can earn and hold. There is no end goal in sight, completing which a person could stop. 

This endless pursuit of money is unhealthy. Money gives birth to greed. Because cognitively a person is aware that the more money he has the greater the quality of life would be and the greater the sense of security in that he will always have more than enough to fulfil his wildest desires. 

This is damaging not only to himself but to others as well. People are ready to play it dirty, use whatever means necessary, exploit whoever they have to and indulge in whatever nefarious activities they need to, just so that they can increase that pile of green, or more aptly, those numbers of bank balance on the screen of their computers. 

Much of what is wrong with the world can be explained by this. A wise man once said, "There is enough in this world for everyone’s needs but not for everyone’s greed."

The unchecked use of resources throughout the world is a result of corporate greed who want to use the said resources to build products to sell to consumers so that their stack of cash keeps rising. The environment is being affected due to this as well but who cares as long as certain people’s pockets are kept filled at all times, right? 

I wonder what they will do when there is nothing left of this world anymore. Earth’s future is looking more and more like that of Mars, a barren wasteland which was once green and luscious, destroyed by human greed.

2. Social Status

We just love assigning ranks to anything and everything we lay our eyes upon. We do it in our education system, in our financial system and even to ourselves as a member of the society, albeit abstract. “Hey dude, check out that girl at the bar, she is a perfect 10.”

Our social status is very important to us. According to Maslow’s need hierarchy, “esteem” is our 4th need as humans. We are hardwired to desire respect, recognition and status among our fellow homo sapiens. And unfortunately much of that status today, comes from the amount of money you have. 

Why is that a millionaire or a billionaire automatically looks charming. Our perception of his personality changes the very second we realise that he has a lot of money. You may deny it but it is a psychological fact. 

Therefore, to increase status in society, a person might do two things. 

One, he buys stuff that he has absolutely no need for or even desire for, for that matter. Just because it feeds his perception of societal status, not even realising that it doesn’t matter to anybody else except himself. 

In fact Will Smith said it perfectly, “We spend money that we do not have, on things we do not need, to impress people who do not care.” The direct result of this is the accumulation of debt which keeps on multiplying as a result of spending habits. In the end a person loses everything. He loses even the stuff he needs because of the stuff he wanted.

Another thing a person does, is he makes it his life’s goal to earn as much money as possible. He misses out on everything else, his family, friends, little happiness of life, peace of mind and a lot more.

It is quite ironic and paradoxical at the same time. He works hard to live a life of status for which he works very hard but ends of not being able to enjoy it because he has exhausted himself due to all the stress and doesn’t care anymore.

3. Income Disparity

The monetary exchange system is a rigged game created by the powers that be to take control of the world. This might sound like a crazy conspiracy theory but if you just put aside your reservations for one day and do the research, you would understand that humanity has been in deep water the moment the system was created.

The Federal Reserve System is akin to the devil and money is akin to his toy. Why else do you think that 1% of the world’s population controls 90% of the world’s money. And future predictions indicate that the 90% will be soon be 99%. 

Just a few months back, it was reported by Oxfam that the 62 richest people in the world, own as much wealth as the poorer half of the world’s population. Just let that sink in. The realisation is shocking isn’t it? A handful of people, who could all fit in a single room, have as much as the world’s poorer half.

If that is not disparity, I don’t know what is! Money is not the direct cause of it. The main culprit here is the system behind it that makes such injustice possible. The rich gets reacher and the poor gets poorer. And the situation is worsening by the day. 

The underlying effects of this are world hunger, world poverty, lack of access to even basic education, which in turn breed many other problems like, robberies, terrorism, violence, abuse, etc.

This is a serious problem that is eating away the very world we live in. If the same trend continues, to which all signs point, it could mean a death sentence for millions or maybe hundreds of millions of people in the coming years. 

The people most affected by this are in Africa, middle east and South-East Asia. People are dying left and right like insects whose value have no lives whereas the creators of this rigged game are enjoying their lives, without so much as a hint of a guilt. We really screwed up or rather screwed with.

So, is money really the root of all evil? Is the devil as black as painted? This is for the reader to decide, as everyone has their own perception of reality. 

In my personal opinion, money is only a tool. The actual root of the evil is the system behind it. The system that let the powerful people remain in power while the rest of the world, toils away into oblivion.