Money: Good for what ails ya?

Here's a recent study that looks a bit disturbing. Apparently just handling money can trigger endorphines enough to dull physical pain:

ABSTRACT—People often get what they want from the social system, and that process is aided by social popularity or by having money. Money can thus possibly substitute for social acceptance in conferring the ability to obtain benefits from the social system. Moreover, past work has suggested that responses to physical pain and social distress share common underlying mechanisms. Six studies tested relationships among reminders of money, social exclusion, and physical pain. Interpersonal rejection and physical pain caused desire for money to increase. Handling money (compared with handling paper) reduced distress over social exclusion and diminished the physical pain of immersion in hot water. Being reminded of having spent money, however, intensified both social distress and physical pain.

Yeah, I remember hearing about a similar study recently where they found that $ provoked addiction comparable to potent narcotics. I didn't find the idea that $ can be drug-like too shocking, but I was a little surprised by the strength of effect they were able to measure. I think $ probably impacts our psyche more than we've begun to realize.

"more than we've begun to realize" you mean people haven't been paying attention to this shit? capital is a ghost god roaming our psychic landscapes creating mindless slaves from individuals, controlling cultural normalization, encouraging antisocial greed and destructive goals. this vampiric god's totem is currency, a little reminder of our ultimate servitude, and an opiate to keep us blind to the real resources surrounding us and within us. there are certain distinct characteristics of money spirits, their immediacy to, and coddling of, the ego being a critical aspect. i realize some people on this forum are not magicians, only book collectors, but for anyone who has actively tried to subdue and transcend the ego - this task is difficult enough without the enemy being strengthened by artificial props. i grew up on the poverty line, a carpenter's son, my father's business catered to the wealthy - remodeling old mansions, doing finish-work for new mansions - observing his clients and their children it became exceedingly clear to me even as a boy that money only serves as a means to become more and more detached from social reality and more absorbed in the ego. it is true however that money creates allowances and indulgences which may be useful to a magician, i have found that the attitude must always be that cash (and the ego it inflates for that matter) is more of a slave to the self and its true will than a goal unto itself. seriously though, i thought being mystified by the process of sucking the sweet money teet was a phase most people not afflicted by its addiction had already been through.

ezavan wrote:"more than we've begun to realize" you mean people haven't been paying attention to this shit?

Well, some folks do, and many folks don't. Even still, how about the pan-generational effects of $? The extra-planetary effects? We could go on listing implications for some time, no?

seriously though, i thought being mystified by the process of sucking the sweet money teet was a phase most people not afflicted by its addiction had already been through.

Not necessarily. Did you watch the "Earth" episode of Lon Milo Duquette's "The Great Work"?

As for the rant, I think we're in general agreement.