Speechy Head

Hi comrades,

I wrote this speech for an english debate I may take part in. Just wondering what your views on it are.


Money is the root of all evil is a controversial statement to make in our materialist culture, driven by who has and who has not. What a person possesses very often is taken as a direct reflection of their worth. Why else is it that we spend our entire adult lives, and increasingly our childhood too, being instructed not on how to live as a well balanced person, but how to achieve as a productive economic success story. Capitalism is about competition. Some would say that’s an inevitable result of life on a planet with finite resources. I’d say that it is precisely because of the earth’s limited capacity that we must not compete, but co-operate. Replace greed with generosity, not just to one another but to the planet. Give back some of what you take, or better, take only what you need in the first place. Clawing for more status, more belongings, will not make us happy individuals, or a healthy society.

I recently read The Spirit Level, a study on why more equal societies, who place less importance on money and material, almost always do better. It’s a fascinating book and puts facts behind the arguments many have been making for a long time, that inequality does not drive us to improve, but forces us apart. Unequal societies have less trust, happiness and social mobility, yet far more of a “devil take the hindmost attitude” where the weakest and most vulnerable are abandoned to “market forces” – a de-humanised idea that fails to account for the impact on the people involved.

In my opinion, money is not the root of all evil, but a symptom of it. Yes, I believe that humans can surpass their avarice and achieve through our common endeavour, but I can’t deny that it exists within all of us in the first place. If we didn’t use money, some other means of valuing goods would spring up – money itself is not an inherently bad idea. It is the concepts that create money which are evil

There are of course, many definitions of evil – it’s a subjective term, but for me, something that causes harm to innocent beings is about as close to evil as you can get, this side of Fred Goodwin.

What are those concepts then, behind money? Firstly, the idea that everything has a measureable worth, people included. If things can be worth a value, then others will, by necessity, be worthless. Perhaps this isn’t so harmful for inanimate objects – a used teabag isn’t of great rarity, and opposed to a new teabag it just can’t compare. What causes hurt, what makes this idea of “worth and worthless” so damaging is when it is applied to things that live. Be they animal, plant or human. No one, not one single human on this planet is worthless. And telling someone they are that is probably the most dangerous statement you can make.

As considerate and thoughtful beings, we can of course see this for ourselves. It is blindingly obvious that no matter where you come from, regardless of your preferences, opinions or ideas, you deserve to be treated like an item of incomparable value. In economist-speak, you are the most rarefied commodity there is. Unique and irreplaceable.

Supply and demand, however, is not a considerate and thoughtful being. It is not even a being. It loses out very quickly on a very basic level.

To conclude, I think it’s important to look not at abstract values, but how this affects normal people, every minute of the day. We need a concrete example of how the ideologies behind money and our system of value cause harm to innocents. Well you don’t exactly have to look far. Banking crisis, anyone? I mean, it’s not like the whole profit-greed-move money until it doesn’t look like money anymore system fell apart or anything is it? Only three million people are unemployed! Maggie Thatcher would be proud…

I don’t need to tell you this, about how we risk losing a generation to unemployment again, or how communities are breaking down in the white heat of consumerism – driven apart by jealousy and fear and greed that is forced upon us all, you can read it all over the papers or watch it on the news.

But what I ask you, no beg you, to do, is not just read about it or watch it, or write high minded speeches about it, but to go out and DO something about it. So what if on my own I can’t change the world, we rely on each other to be able to it and maybe, if we’re lucky, we’ve got enough time to start our own revolution.