The statement, ‘Money is happiness’ hides a fallacy. I think a more correct stand would be, Money is a means or source of happiness. Our Economics lesson formulate ab initio (= as an initial premis) that, money is a means, not an end.
If money were happiness, if would lead to avarice (= greed for money). In Christian ethics it is one of the damned vices and it is a kind of hoarding.
If we trace the genesis (= birth) of money, the nature of the vice and the foolishness of treating this as a kind of happiness shall become apparent (= clear to view). As the family of the great human race become impossibly big, the barter system (= exchange of goods and commodities as a means of living) became dead. Money came in as a common medium of exchange. The main objective was to have access to the commodities of use for money. Naturally the craze for money for its own sake is to love the symbol more than what it stands for. The means becomes more significant than the end. What can be funnier?
Now for the other part of the statement: What kind of happiness does money cater (= provide)? Its primary function is to provide us with the commodities of life and living. Naturally, the more of it the merrier, as the proverb goes. But our needs are unlimited, while our means are limited. As a corollary to this truism (= truth of life) men crave (= desire) for more and more of money. If sets in motion a kind of competition that undervalues everything in life. Nothing is regarded as more supreme that this craze for money.
This is a vicious cycle: more money leads to more happiness, more happiness leads to a greater urge to have more money.
Happiness is both a state of the mind as also a product of material prosperity. Acute poverty is the vile lane through which fatal diseases attack and lay waste the sound, bonny (= cheerful) body that we get at birth. Rabindranath and Vivekananda raised their voices against such poverty; the one through his inimitable arguments while the other through his sledge-hammer speeches.
On the other hand the crazy money-hunt, today, feeds the sin of avarice like feeding the man-eating mythical ogre (= monster) Bakarakshas of the Mahabharat. If is now evident that hoarded money may make one a target of money-seekers. Clearly it is not conducive to (= resulting in) happiness in the real sense. On the contrary it preempts (= deprives) other’s happiness. A more equitable (= arrangement based on equity and social justice) distribution of happiness is what we need. This simple thesis, brilliantly expounded, could fetch Amartya Sen the Nobel Prize. But we love to fly in the face of facts (= ignore the reality). The craze does not seem to disappear as expected. There are great benefactors (= men’doing works of public benefit), there are pious bodies of the UNO or autonomous bodies. But for individual or organisation there are a score of greedy every such monsters.
One is tempted to ask: Is Money and Happiness leading us to a life of animals, nasty brutish and animalized, being dominated by a solo instinct-to survive through snarl?
