My brother and I were at it again, arguing over the power of money as the prime motivator of the human spirit.

Maximizing one’s profits, whether through the stock market, the board room, career choice or the hording of one’s own possessions is what drives most people, so says my brother.

We were talking about the wisdom (according to my brother) or greed (according to me) of one of my neighbors who is selling his property in such a way that will maximize his take but diminish the aesthetics of the neighborhood. He has chosen to thumb his nose at the neighbors he is leaving behind and destroy one of the very attractions that lured him to this street years ago.

Why, I wonder. On the surface it appears that the answer is “money.” So while my brother can certainly claim to be right, I still believe, at root, he is wrong. For beyond tending to our basic needs, we want money not for its own sake, not for what money can buy, but for what money (and its surrogate: conspicuous stuff) can do.

Money, as Avner Offer teaches us, has the capacity to earn us the elusive gift of “regard,” that is, “acknowledgement, attention, acceptance, respect, reputation, status, power, intimacy, love, friendship, kinship, sociability.” *

Having money in our society, or even the appearance of having money, can secure those intangible but oh-so-desirable social goods that are essential to our feelings of peace, pride, satisfaction. As Adam Smith, of all people, says in The Theory of Moral Sentiments,

  “What is the ... pursuit of wealth…? Is it to supply the necessities of nature? The wages of the meanest laborer can supply them… [So what are the real] advantages which we propose to gain by that great purpose of human life which we call bettering our condition [ie, chasing ever more money]? To be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy, complacency, and approbation, are all the advantages which we can propose to derive from it.”

Which is to say, we crave money so we will not feel forgotten, overlooked, invisible, small. We crave it because we know that our lives are like ships sailing on the waters. We come and the waters part. We pass by and the waters close up again, as if we were never there. So, in a society that tends to regard what we have more than what we do, or our worth in dollars more than our worth in spirit, we crave money.

It is not money, then, that ultimately motivates us, but what it does for us, how it makes us feel.

Which begs the question: what if there were other ways to feel “regarded”? What if our compassion, our selflessness, our peace-making won regard? What if showing up when others stayed away, calling when others forgot, sharing instead of hording, earning less so that others could earn more, owning less so that others could have more, was the way our “worth” was measured, our “regard” won?

What if, in fact, having too much money was held in disregard? What if we were judged by what we gave away (in time, love, care, things, money) rather than by what we kept?

How would that change our economy, our jobs, our schedules, our heroes, our appetites, our lives, our well-being, our happiness?

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to find out?

*(from “Between the gift and the market: the economy of regard.”)