People over money is a personal philosophy of mine. Like most personal philosophies, it comes out of a response to other personal philosophies.
When I was in high school, I was obsessed with Lil’ Wayne. A full-fledged Wayniac, I used to kill the parking lot blasting Tha Carter II and Da Drought 3, hoppin out the ’95 Corolla in my short shorts for soccer practice. As far as I know Lil Wayne is the esteemed originator of the phrase: “Money over Bitches”; he even has “MOB” tattooed on his body. Call it misogynist, call it a reworking of Mazlow’s hierarchy of needs, but either way, it has mad resonance in the rap community.
Notice the tattoo on his chest
At some point, (After Tha Carter III) I traded in Wayne for some K.R.I.T, but the concept of MOB stuck with me.
What happens when American decadent society has left you behind, and you’re stuck fighting for scraps? To me, Hip-hop, especially the trap-rap scene that became so popular in the second half of the last decade, serves as a window into hyper-capitalism. A Hobbesian world of scarcity where the war of all against all can only be escaped through gettin money. Everybody’s tryin to make it, but as K.R.I.T. puts it: “Lions is all, we really no lambs”. Priorities change, and eatin’ no longer means eating. The drive for material success becomes life defining. I’ll stop intellectualizing it, but you get the point.
No one should ever have to live in a world like that. End of.
Ya boy Hobbes
We need institutions that put people over money. The current distribution of wealth within and between societies is an embarrassment to the human community. People over profit doesn’t go far enough for me. It’s nice, but it seems like the smiley PR rhetoric of corporate social responsibility. People over money goes deeper. It’s about what motivates you; it’s about what inspires how you think and act. It reaches down into my soul, and turns up the volume on the alarm clock next to the bed that my cooperative instincts have been snoring in. People over money. It is that simple. For just a second, turn off the part of your brain telling you to be realistic, and telling you that this is the real world, not the hippie-world on Weekly Standard covers. The real world belongs to us, and it can’t exist without us. We must create prosocial and cooperative incentive structures, and we must reinvent reason as a humane blend of critical thought and empathy. We need true innovation.
Under circumstances free of the tragic choices forced upon so many of us, individuals can, and do, put people over money. Can our politico-economic systems? Not unless we reform them, reconstruct them, and force them to evolve. That’s what #Peopleovermoney means to me.
Now check this Big K.R.I.T. joint for real.