[OPE] intermission: value of knowledge

I am of course aware of the Abba repertoire. This song is similar in intent
to Madonna's "material girl", Barrett Strong's "Money" and Led Zep's
"stairway to heaven". But if you think that your ability to do something is
conditional on acquiring money, or if you hunt for a rich partner who will
look after your material needs (so that you don't have to work), you're
suffering from an impoverished intellect, or you are fairly desperate. In
Marx's optic, human beings are beings who "create and relate" rather than
beings who simply "truck, barter and exchange", and for the purpose of
creating and relating no money is necessarily required, although class
society might shut you out of certain circles for lack of money - because if
you don't have the money, there's no entry, or, you don't have what it
takes, you are inferior... because lack of money means you did not make
something better of your life.

Boys and girls who are simply after the money don't really make you happy
though, other than perhaps momentarily, and don't make you a better person.
To want money is quite legitimate in itself, but by the time your desire for
money becomes entangled with the search for a partner, you've lost the
plot... something which is hinted at obliquely in the Abba song. The Abba
song is in a sense quite clever, because by overstating or lampooning the
joys of a rich man's world, it affirms the desire for money as reasonable or
legitimate in itself, while simultaneously conveying a charming naivety
about how to get money, and sympathy for the tragic plight of not having "a
little money" to be all you can be, shifting between major key to minor key.
Point is, if you really tried to be all you can be, if you had the
confidence in this sense, you might reap a monetary reward in the end. In
reality of course, Abba wasn't naive about money at all, and donated to the
Swedish social democratic party. The acronym "Abba" was also the name of a
wellknown Swedish fish-canning company (in Aramaic and Hebrew it means
"Daddy").

Jurriaan

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Received on Sun Nov 15 06:52:09 2009