Just Make It Sacred

Why do you eat vegetables? I admire the fact that you’re conscious of your diet, and of the ecological footprint that is minimal for locally grown seasonal vegetables, and there is no animal suffering…
– Because it’s cheap.
Oh. And why do you live here? You are really living the emerging culture of sharing when you live together with six other people in this flat and you reduce resource consumption by sharing the bathroom and the kitchen and…
– Because it’s cheap.
Ah. So tell me why are you taking walks in this city, reading a book on a park bench and sitting down to have a cup of coffee…
– Because it’s cheap.
You seem to have a serious issue with money, my friend. I am actually concerned about your mental health. Have you considered visiting a psychoanalist?
– Do you know how much they charge?
Damn it! Are you kidding me? If this is the final key to all your motivation, then why are you living at all?
– Because funeral expenses my friend. Graves aren’t cheap.

That was a joke. What is going on here? What does he “want” to achieve? I mean, the impulses that lie underneath his consciousness? Isn’t he looking for a convenient token for that what limits his material freedom – so that he can keep believing in his formal freedom? He wishes to perceive money as that what limits his actual freedom, so he has to make it sacred. Only something sacred can limit us without leaving a trace. The sacred subdues the concept itself, it can impose this absolute limit. So it is in a way a dimension on its own, subject to a different economy than all other human interactions. Its ties with reality run deeper than those of our concepts.
The sacred harbors an echo of the absolute, because we reduce anything and its opposite to it (in the joke, we reduce mind and body, life and death to money) and as a symbol of the absolute it can limit our movements without limiting our idea of freedom, because it has convinced us to understand it as the bounds of our freedom.
It is late in many senses, but this seems an interesting dialectics. We make offending things “sacred” if we want to save the purity of our ideas (freedom, love, justice, beauty, truth)