Pink Floyd Was Right

Note: I am making a documentary film this year entitled “How to Save Democracy,” and I’m planning to have the film come out before November’s election. In support of it, I have launched a crowdfunding campaign to help fund the making of it. You can learn more about the campaign and contribute here: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/how-to-save-democracy/x/1658357#/

I’ve written about how democracy is faltering in the U.S.—the U.S. is currently rated a flawed democracy by the Democracy Index—in my last two Substack essays, How to Save Democracy, and What is Democracy?

There are many factors that currently lie at the root of the U.S. being a flawed democracy, and I discussed these in those two essays. But there’s also another driving force: money, and the commodification of everything.

Let me start with an age-old adage: sex sells.

But these days, everything sells, everything is for sale. It’s all about the stack, Jack.

Pink Floyd knew this and expressed these insights in their 1973 album Dark Side of the Moon, with the Roger Waters penned song, Money. They read the tea leaves of where society was going, and stated it precisely with their ironic and critical dive into what was driving the coming changes.

It’s an age-old story about money. The Bible has two passages about money: one where it is stated that “the love of money is the root of all evil.” The other is when Jesus threw the money changers out of the temple, saying “My house shall be called a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves.”

In more modern times, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his first inaugural address on March 4, 1933 in the midst of the Great Depression, promised to expel the “money changers” from the political system, saying, “They knew only the rules of self-seekers and had no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.”

FDR knew what needed to be done, and had the leadership skills and courage to do so. He forced bankers to relinquish control of the monetary system, and cut short their bloodthirsty and blind ambitions, attributes that crashed the world economy.

Back to Pink Floyd. Here’s the beginning verses to Money:

Money
Get away
You get a good job with more pay and you're okay
Money
It's a gas
Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash

New car, caviar, four star, daydream
Think I'll buy me a football team

Money
Get back
I'm alright, Jack, keep your hands off of my stack
Money
It's a hit
Don't give me that do goody good bullshit

I'm in the high-fidelity first-class traveling section
And I think I need a Lear jet

Roger Waters wrote the song as a criticism of the power of money and the capitalist system in general, saying “I’m sure that the free market isn't the whole answer ... my hope is that mankind will evolve into a more co-operative and less competitive beast.”

And yet, we’re far away from that more cooperative and less competitive beast.

Money’s allure is a national religion. That religion even put one of the moneyed class in the White House in 2016. And it’s also that religion that threatens democracy to no end.

How did we get to this point? Granted, money is the avatar of life, because we all need money to pay the bills. Beyond that, money has always had a mesmerizing influence, and for some people, they will do whatever it takes to amass as much of it as possible, no matter what it entails and the ethical lapses it necessitates.

Remember how I mentioned that FDR threw the money changers out of the political system? It was the money changers who crashed the economy in 1929, and Roosevelt knew the only way to repair society was to cut off their tentacles.

A few decades before FDR’s presidency, the U.S. was also going through economic spasms, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Teddy Roosevelt, FDR’s cousin and 26th president of the U.S., oversaw progressive changes that took power away from the banking industry, and in the process put a stop to the economic inequities of his time.

Teddy Roosevelt was well aware of what society needed to do to create a more equitable society, and stated as such, saying, “There can be no real political democracy unless there is something approaching economic democracy.”

Another leading figure of that era, Louis Brandeis, first a leader of the Progressive movement and later a Supreme Court Justice said, “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

Even with these understandings, by the 1920s the bankers again took over the political and financial system, and by the end of the decade, crashed the world economy.

It was this crash that led to the rise of fascism in Europe and precipitated the rise to power of Hitler and Mussolini.

After FDR repaired society and restored democratic ideals, fairness was the guiding force for many decades.

The shift in attitude began in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan as president, by virtue of Reagan allowing corporations free reign. The changes at first were a trickle, but with each ensuing president—Democrat and Republican—the love affair with money only became stronger and stronger.

As the love affair blossomed and bloomed, wealth inequality became more and more stark, with wealth concentrated into fewer and fewer hands; meanwhile the great masses of people struggled to make ends meet, and had to go deeper and deeper into debt to stay afloat.

Businessmen and entrepreneurs were now feted as the heroes of society—they were the job creators and economic engines that drove everything. And money was at the forefront: Donald Trump’s 1987 book, The Art of the Deal, was a huge bestseller, and catapulted Trump into the echelons of business guru.

Other business gurus ensued, distilling their “wisdom” for all to hear, for a price. It was all about becoming a success, grabbing the bling, selling the hype, and charging whatever was felt the market would bear.

Everything now had a price tag, and it was all about going for broke, striking out for riches, and the notoriety and baubles that came with it.

Banks and corporations in general were making record profits, and that was seen as beneficial for society. It was felt that the free market should determine outcomes, and that society did best when government stepped out of the way.

There was a detour in the road in 2008, when banks, drunk with thirst for greater and greater profits, crashed the world’s economy, reminiscent of 1929. The government bailed them out—while leaving homeowners and others who were financially ruined left holding the bag—while the banks continued on their merry way.

The greed of banks and corporations knows no bounds, because amassing large sums of wealth is not seen as a moral failing—instead it’s seen as the advantageous consequences of a free market system that allows for the victors to garner all the spoils, and for the rest of the population to fight over the crumbs.

It’s this fight over the crumbs that’s tearing democracy apart in the U.S.

Many people are angry at and disillusioned by a government that they see as only caring about the wealthy, and are willing to listen to those who tell them that the government can’t be trusted.

Those people who narrate to them stories of an untrustworthy government are themselves motivated by greed—they see a market in spinning alternate facts and stories, allowing them to make money off the people who swallow their tales.

The U.S. currently is spinning in a turbulent direction, with a sizable portion of the population not knowing what or who to believe. At the same time, these people are continually bombarded by the market, to buy more, pay more, and go deeper in hock to sustain their unsustainable lifestyles.

In 2016, Donald Trump played, and preyed, on the fears and anger of that sizable portion of the population to catapult himself into the presidency.

The World Happiness Report, a publication of the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Solutions Network, has been issued annually since 2012. It looks at a number of factors in ascertaining the well-being and happiness of a nation’s citizens, and then puts a report together that ranks countries on their general well-being and happiness.

It looks beyond GDP as a measure of happiness, questioning whether the relative affluence of a country’s population is the proper metric to tell whether people are happy. Instead, social bonds and social cohesion are the important yardsticks; on the website for the World Happiness Report the researchers ask, “Should we consider some parts of our society to be ‘off bounds’ to the profit motive, so that we can foster the spirit of cooperation, trust, and community?”

And in the U.S., that’s a foreign concept, the idea that some parts of society should be off bounds to the profit motive.

Just think about one of the things that can help propel a young person to improve their life: college. Nowadays in America, if you want to go to college, chances are you will have to be willing to go anywhere from $30,000 to $100,000 (and more) in debt, just for undergraduate school.

That’s sickening. Democracy can’t thrive when such a thing is the norm. (Meanwhile, in Europe, college is either free or at very low cost.)

And that’s just college debt. There are many other ways for an American citizen to amass large debts—such as medical debt, car loans, credit cards, and mortgages.

Meanwhile, corporations are sitting pretty, making record profits while corporate executives are making salaries and bonuses in the tens and hundreds of millions.

It’s infuriating. And it’s tearing society apart. The middle class has been eviscerated, yet they don’t know who to blame. So they figure, if you can’t beat them, join them, and so they just keep hustling to try and bring in the bucks, by any means necessary.

It’s just like Pink Floyd sang:

“Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash.”

Democracy at its core is about human flourishing. Not just for a few who have the money. For everyone. When we get that right, democracy will be able to turn it around.

And it needs to happen soon. Or else we will see the lessons of history repeat, when fascism rose in the 1930s in Germany and Italy because of a ruined world economy and a citizenry that was suffering because of that ruined economy.

Only this time, it will infect many more countries.

After all, according to the Democracy Index, the same organization that rated the U.S. a flawed democracy, only 20 percent of the countries of the world are currently democracies. Two decades ago, the number of democracies in the world was 40 percent.

That’s what’s called a downward trend. And it’s also a dangerous trend.