Making money just for the sake of making money is a game, like bridge, in which people can find extreme pleasure and which can occupy almost all their waking hours. But one of the rules of the game is that you must pretend not to enjoy it. It must most definitely be classified as work, as that which you have, to do as a duty to your family and community, and which therefore affords many businessmen the best possible excuse for staying away from home and from their wives. The nemesis of this attitude is that it flows over into the so-called leisure or nonwork areas of life in such a way that playing with children, giving attention to one´s wife, exercising on the golf course, and purchasing certain luxuries (which are largery symbolic) also became duties. Survival itself becomes a duty and even a drag, for the pretense of not enjoying the game gets under the skin and tightens the muscles which repress joyous and sensuous emotion. To same extent this may be a penance for the exploitation of poverty, but, as should be well understood by this time, penances do nothing to correct evil, they are simply payoffs which allow business as usual.
It is thus that most businessmen work in enviromnemts, such as the average office, which are unpardonably ugly. I was astonished, in coming to America, to find that even doctors had offices - as distinct from consluting rooms, which were often pleasant libraries set about with works of art, with a surgery set off behind. Only quite rarely do people involved in the money game know what to do with money when they make it. They make ritual gifts to charity, religion and the arts, but their beatific vision is crisp green paper in the hand , and this wholly abstract, inedible, and spiritual satisfaction far surpasses harems of fair women, wide lands and forests, gorgeous palaces and solemn temples, silks and furs, and even reasonably palatable food. By and large, no one is poorer in real wealth than a man of business. For he is a very strict ascetic. In this atmosphere the arts and literature also become serious business instead of simple delight. Paintings and works of sculpture are bought and sold as investments, Picassos and Pollocks having ups and downs like shares in General Dynamics. William Earle, a professor of philosophy at Northwestern, pointed out that his up-to-date colleagues would not even dream of lying awake at night pondering vast problems of the universe. Instead, they arrive with briefcases at their offices, punctually at 9:00 AM, and "do philosophy" (as they say) until 5:00 PM, whereafter they return home to martinis, dinner, and television just as if they were accountants. Performing musicians must join a trade union managed by goons who can barely whistle.
There must be some connection between the commercialization of life and the separation of religion from mystiticsm and magic. It is, of course, well known that the lords spiritual and temporal of the feudal system gradually lost their power to the bankers and merchants during the centuries following the Reformation, and it is understandable that this new ruling class would want the Church to have no power of its own, but to be subservient to the mysticism and ascetism of money.
(Alan Watts - In my own way)