Needless to say, there is a variety of common statements about money that have a negative attitude. You might actually believe in one of them and have a bunch of proves of their truth or you might not see any sense in them while subconsciously bearing these believes in your mind. Beware, they are rather dangerous. Such believes can seriously disrupt your relationship and deprive you of a possibility to improve your financial condition.
One of the most popular believes of such a kind is certainly of the ability of money to spoil people.
What is exactly this belief about?
In all likelihood, you do not need any explanation for this belief as you have certainly heard it from many people. It is quite possible you yourself repeat it from time to time or even strongly convinced about its logic.
The common belief is that a poor person is wealthy in a different way. Instead of having material wealth, such a person is morally rich. Some of one’s typical features of personality making him or her thus good are being industrious, generosity, honesty and readiness to help other people.
Then, according to this common belief, if such a person acquires wealth, something awful happens to one’s personality. Such an individual absolutely loses one’s morality, turning into a lying greedy beast without any moral principles who does not care about anyone except for oneself.
Why do we believe something like that?
It is rather difficult to say what was the initial resource of such a strong belief, however, it propagated around the world with a great speed and is certainly still one of the most favourite aspects of various religions.
On the one hand, previous governments were certainly benefiting from making their society believe in it since the majority of people belonged to the poor class and it the separation between them and the rich was so gigantic that there were no chances for changing such a situation. Certainly, believing in their high morality, was a form of an escape mechanism for poor people and, it also might have made them less eager to strike against the rich since they believed they actually should be happy about their pity condition.
On the other hand, religions brought it even to the higher level making people believe being interested in material comfort is a sin.
Is it really so?
Well, if you actually believe in the ability of money to spoil people, in all likelihood, you know at least a couple of examples of the individuals who obviously have changed after improving their financial condition.
In fact, being generous or greedy does not depend on the income of a person. While there are many examples of wealthy people building their empires getting so focused on their material things to the level when they actually start save money to an excessive point being so afraid of losing their possessions, there are also enough examples of people, especially those who received their money without particular effort, who are feeling free to spend it without a stop whether it is on themselves or on others. There also individuals believing they are better than those who do not have money, although there are also people without money who believe they are either better than wealthy people or the rest of poor people. There are also enough poor greedy people and generous poor people.
The conclusion is that the psychology of a human being is a way too complex to be defined merely by a financial condition and, in all likelihood, there are some internal traits that can just become more visible with the changing conditions.
Yet, there are situations in which people indeed decide to change their circle after becoming rich, however, very often the reason for it is not the belief of being better than all of those less successful friends. On the contrary, many people start believe their wealthy friends, especially those acquiring their wealth without particular effort such as winning a lottery are obliged to help everyone.
What is so harmful about this belief?
Actually, it is easier to say there is absolutely nothing good about it. Such an attitude is extremely judgemental for both you and the rest of society.
People who strongly believe in it, tend to feel bad any time they have a chance of increasing their income and subconsciously trying to protect themselves from any possibilities for financial growth.
At the same time, they tend to build a wall between themselves and the people with a higher income labelling them and not trusting them. This can be rather disturbing for interpersonal communication and absolutely unnecessary.