by Jess Hoffmann
What is the difference between financial security and hoarding wealth?
What is the difference between financial security and hoarding wealth?
What is the difference between financial security and hoarding wealth? What is the difference between financial security and hoarding wealth? What is the difference between financial security and hoarding wealth? What is the difference between financial security and hoarding wealth?
If I say it enough times—three, twenty-three, one hundred and ten, every morning before I open my eyes and at night before bed; if I say it over and over like an incantation; if I obsess about it, months-into-years on end, alone; if I ask everyone I know to weigh in—will the answer come?
Will someone hand me the budget spreadsheet she’s used to figure it out? Send me a link to a Web site where there’s a calculator programmed to compute the magic formula that will guide me, free me from responsibility, from anxious/guilty not-knowing? What algebra or philosophy or community will give me the number or equation or clarity of conviction to stop asking that question and move?
(money, and energy, and other resources and just generally out of this impasse)
***
I want to tell you: I never expected to be hung up on this question. I mean, I never expected it would even be a question for me.
I hadn’t seriously envisioned the possibility of financial security; I’d survived without it my whole life; I wasn’t aiming for it and certainly never thought hoarding was something I might do.
And then, suddenly, late twenties, I find myself with tens of thousands of dollars to my name, and probably more to come—dollars I can save or spend or invest or give away, dollars I can hardly wrap my brain around—yet my brain counts and re-counts them, like I am some old newspaper cartoon of a small greedy man counting and re-counting his piles of gold pieces, even if I am not rubbing my hands together and smacking my lips with evil pleasure while I count, even if the whole motivation, the whole point of the obsession, is that I don’t want to live in a world where that cartoon man reflects reality, that I want instead to be part of an altogether different set of arrangements and am not sure where I fit in the group project of getting there, or what will happen (to me, to all of us, to me) if we don’t.
What is the difference between financial security and hoarding wealth?
And:
Who is entitled to financial security, and at what costs?
And:
How can I/we think about financial security for communities, neighborhoods, societies, not just for individuals and families?
And:
How can I explain to the many, many people around me who think individual financial security is an ideal everyone should aspire toward—diligently, responsibly, clear-sightedly, as part of some social contract, even—why I think there is a problem with hoarding wealth? (What is the difference between economic security and hoarding wealth? What is wrong with hoarding wealth? What is right with economic security? Why is responsibility, in the dominant narrative, an individual concept, even, or especially, when it is achieved at the expense of others, of the group?)
***
There could be, of course, a long story here about how the particular dollars I have were accumulated and transferred to me, which would be part of a much longer story—both of which would have tendrilly-specific subplots that make them unique as well as consistencies, overarching themes that connect them to all the other possible stories of wealth accumulation, themes that many of the characters within these stories generally don’t want to see or willfully obscure (whiteness, capitalism, colonialism recur) by foregrounding individual personality, tenacity, relationships. But I am better at asking questions than telling stories and figure I can leave the storytelling to others.
The simple fact is that I, now, in my late twenties, having grown up with very little financial stability and having never envisioned or aimed for personal wealth, having been for years committed to and working toward economic justice for everyone, have more money in the bank than most of my peers, and it’s been keeping me up at night trying to figure out “the right†thing to do about that.
(Also, if I tell you the stories, depending on how I tell them, and what your stories are, you might get caught up in all the same confusion of conflicting empathies, uncertainty about how to love and not judge the individuals involved while criticizing the system, as I tend to do; for here and now, I’d rather you/I stay focused on the questions and structures in which they exist than on particular characters and narratives.)
***
If the money I have access to was in part earned at the expense of other people and their communities and land (which I believe all wealth in capitalism, by definition, is), is there any right thing to do with it other than redistribute it, give it back to those communities, give it over to changing the structure?
(Would that be reading in part as in whole?)
If the money anyone has access to was in part earned at the expense of other people and their communities and land (which I believe all money, on some level, is), who is entitled to make individual choices about any of it? (Again, what is the relationship between the parts and the whole?)
If I spent my childhood torn up over having to move over and over again; if my adult relationships have been strained by my deep fears around not having stable housing (replete with monstrous outbursts with people I’ve lived with around moves both voluntary and forced); if I have been one of the displaced, child-of-evictee; is it okay for me to keep a piece of wealth for myself to one day buy some stable housing, even while others cannot? (What if that means displacing someone else, or by my presence in a neighborhood altering it in a way that will lead to others’ displacement?)
If this money has been given to me by a biological family member who loves me because one of the things he wants to do in this life, through his hard work, is give me more freedom than he ever had to explore interests, wander, not be condemned by financial need to take jobs I hate or be stuck in bad relationships or …
If the freedom to explore and not live lives narrowed by financial pressures is a privilege earned in part at the expense of others’ freedom to do the same …
?
***
What might collective security look like?
In a recent talk Angela Davis discussed “how capitalism constitutes our intimate lives, our dreams . . . forces us to dream as individuals, to dream for ourselves, maybe for our families. Why can’t we dream for our communities? Why can’t we dream beyond the nation?â€
What would it mean to use this money that’s landed in my life through a combination of luck, white supremacy, capitalism, a loved one’s very hard and steady work, individualism, prioritizing the nuclear family even after it was split by divorce, and many other things to support financial security for my neighborhood, the city I’m from and love and that the wealth was created in, communities I am a part of, communities affected by the accumulation of this particular wealth, social change so that wealth is distributed evenly, justly, globally?
Is my (is any) individual financial security dependent on others’ financial insecurity? Can I accept (even actively save or invest for) it at that cost?
What would it mean to “invest†money, time, and other resources in collective, community security?
***
What is scarier – a future in which I am personally financially precarious or a future of greater and greater wealth disparity, in which more and more people are (while I thrive)?
***
What is easier to believe possible – personal financial security or a society of mutual support? Are so many of us who believe in and fight for economic justice hoarding money to ensure the former (even at the expense of the latter) because on some level we cannot imagine our dreams coming true? Are we hedging our bets, making half-secret contingency plans, a good deal less than sure we can trust each other, the collective, the possibility of change?
Are we, in fear, “taking care of ourselves†by leaving our dreams of different arrangements, our social-change movements, impoverished, undernourished, by holding some of our resources in private, undiscussed reserves even as we throw our time and energy into those movements, those dreams?
What does it mean to act/give/love/work/imagine provisionally like that, with a knot of fear and failure-to-imagine secretly tightening inside?
What does it mean to undernourish your radical imagination or movement out of fear of individual physical undernourishment?
What does it mean to love or give partially, provisionally, out of fear of abandonment, rejection, alone-ness, failure?
Do we trust each other, our movements, enough?
What kind of giving are we doing while on the side, in the secret unspoken background, we’re hoarding, afraid?
What kind of trust and faith would it require to share, give, more fully?
Why haven’t I told you the numbers yet? Why do I want so badly to tell you the numbers (what I have, what I’ve given, how “responsibly†I’ve handled what I’ve saved)?
Do we need to trust each other, our movements, with our lives?
Is financial security my life? When I am old or sick or tired will it feel like it is?
How much do I, will I, really need?
How much money?
How much justice?
How much courage?
How much vision?
How much trust?
How much sense of possibility?
How much food and heat and housing and stability and love and creativity and freedom and
art
friendship
medical care
conviction
time
sex
imagination
water
support
change
thanks
dancing
home
laughter
connection
planet
…
?
And, for each of the above, and more,
at
what
cost?
What is the difference between economic security and hoarding wealth? I don’t know. I won’t know, no matter how many times I ask it. But I have to keep asking it, all the time, as long as I’m living and working for a world in which that question has been drained of all meaning, has become obsolete.