Money, Freedom, desire Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Money, Freedom, desire - Essay Example The core of the modern world in regard to all of these aspects of life is money. Money provides the means through which humans socialize, fuel their physical needs, and exist within a framework conducive for learning. While freedom is a concept that human beings like to throw around through frameworks that suggest independence, the truth is that freedom does not exist as dependency on a variety of concepts must be initialized and maintained in order to survive. Georg Simmel, in his work The Philosophy of Money, discusses the concepts of freedom as it relates to interdependency in the modern context. The need for money becomes a central dependency from which all other dependencies are built. His discussion includes the contrast of modern man to primitive man, the focus being on the types of dependencies that primitive man in comparison to modern man. Primitive cultures had limited numbers of people through which they created their existence. A tribe may have 30 or 40 people, or maybe even more, but the number of people required to survive was a limited grouping. In this modern age, man requires the people who support the business for which they work, the patrons of that business, the grocery store system, the fuel system for vehicles, and so many large groups of people through whom needs are fulfilled that solitary freedom is near impossible to achieve. If these services were to break down, modern man would be at a loss to find a way to perpetuate his existence. The social lubricant that allows all of these systems to operate is money. Money is the currency that creates value exchange within these systems. The economic system is designed so that in exchange for work, rather than goods and services, money is given so that it can be exchanged for goods and services. It is the intermediary through which interactions and dependencies are created. The novel Madame Bovary: A Study of Provincial Life, Gustave Flaubert examines the many ‘needs’ that live wi thin human existence. The first interdependency is shown through the social climbing that is done by Charles Bovary through his marriage to his first wife, then through his second wife Emma who turns towards desire and drama when her emotional needs are not fulfilled through a conventional life. Emma has fulfilled her basic needs and comforts, her needs for food and shelter beyond her worries. She is restless and feels that she is confined by the structures that have provided these basic needs. Her thoughts of freedom turn outside of her marriage, leading her to seek adventures of desire in order to feel that need to be free. She thinks â€Å"They ran back again to embrace once more, and then she promised him to find soon, by no matter what means, a regular opportunity for seeing each other in freedom at least once a week† (Flaubert and Ranous 270). In her conventional life, she was bound by its responsibilities and lack of emotional engagement, but through her indiscretions, she found moments of freedom. Through her desire to accumulate, to accumulate lovers, possessions, and luxuries, she fulfilled her need for freedom by creating surrogates for the emptiness that her normative life presented her. Mariama Ba discusses a similar theme in her work on marriage in Western Africa and the implications of a misogynist society