Two Concepts of Wealth

I. A Question That Is Not Asked

The rich know they are rich. The poor know they are poor. What no one seems to ask is whether what we call wealth is actually the only wealth there is — and whether the form in which we pursue it produces more of what we are looking for, or less.

In the economics textbooks, in the political programmes, in the news coverage, wealth is measured in only one way. It is a quantity that can be accumulated. Money, property, shares, inheritances, income. A number that can grow larger. Whoever has more is richer than whoever has less. That is the definition. It has become so self-evident that any alternative appears strange — an ascetic outsider position that applies only to monks, dropouts, or esoteric ways of life.

This self-evidence has a history. It is not natural. It is the result of a cultural development about three centuries old, which has reached its peak in our time. Before this development, people measured wealth in other ways. Socrates could stand in the marketplace of Athens, look at the goods on display, and exclaim: How many things there are that I do not need! That was not a joke. It was a determination. Whoever needs little is free. Whoever needs much is bound. The question which of the two situations is the richer would have surprised no one in classical Athens.

II. Two Concepts

There are two concepts of wealth that are seldom set against each other in our time. The first is the dominant one: to have much. Whoever has much is rich. The second is older, forgotten, and worth remembering again: to need little. Whoever needs little is rich in a different but no lesser way.

The two concepts do not describe two different states of the same matter. They describe two different relations to the world. Whoever has much is dependent — on what he has (it can be lost), on what he acquires (he must earn it), on what he must signal (wealth that is not visible barely counts according to the logic of the first concept), and on what others want from him (they want what he has, or what he can become). His wealth is outwardly directed, outwardly secured, and outwardly vulnerable. Whoever needs little is independent of all of this. His wealth is inwardly directed, secured by inner constitution, and vulnerable through inner constitution. Both forms have their vulnerability. But the vulnerabilities differ, and so do the possibilities of coping with them.

The difference is not primarily economic. It is anthropological. It concerns how a person stands in relation to himself and to the world. The first concept presupposes that the self defines itself through what it has. The second presupposes that the self defines itself through what it is and does, independent of what it has. The language we speak has changed over the last two centuries in such a way that this distinction can hardly be spoken aloud.

III. The Possessive Turn of Language

In To Have or To Be? (1976), Erich Fromm made an observation that is linguistically demonstrable and politically deep. The modern European language has, over the course of the last two or three centuries, performed a movement in which verbs have been replaced by nouns that signal possession. Whoever once was, today has. Whoever once loved, today has a relationship. Whoever once thought, today has an opinion. Whoever once believed, today has a belief.

This movement is not trivial. It changes the relationship of the speaker to what he is describing. Whoever is happy is in a state in which he is absorbed. Whoever has happiness possesses something separated from himself, something he can lose, something he must maintain, something he can constantly try to multiply. The possessive turn of language transforms activities and relationships into objects of possession. It transforms what is living into what is available. It transforms what is happening into what has happened.

Fromm demonstrates this movement with texts. In older European texts — in Eckhart, in Luther, in Goethe in his more reflective moments — the verb predominates. In modern texts, the noun with to have predominates. This shift is not merely linguistic. It is the linguistic trace of a cultural transformation in which the world is increasingly perceived as a collection of available things, and in which the self is increasingly defined as the owner of these things.

IV. What Fromm Adds — and Where He Stops

Fromm's points are strong in diagnosis and weak in therapy. Strong is his observation that the having-modality is not an individual character trait but a structural logic of modern society. It is economically produced — through what Fromm calls the marketing character. The person in this society experiences himself as a bundle of qualities he sells on the market. His worth is his market value. His identity is a product identity. He is not someone who has something. He himself is something that can be had.

Strong, too, is his observation that the having-modality is never sated. To have knows no enough. It knows only the next step. Whoever has five hundred thousand wants a million. Whoever has a million wants ten. There is no point at which the having-person could pause and say: now it is enough. The inner measure is missing. The outer measure, against which he compares himself, shifts with every order of magnitude reached. This observation is not meant morally. It is structural. It describes a logic that operates independently of the person in whom it is embodied.

Fromm becomes weak where he tries to derive a therapy from the diagnosis. He calls for a new society that should be being-oriented. He proposes political reforms that, in the first half of the book, are still carried by analytical sharpness, but in the second half tip into a kind of moral programme that the analytical depth cannot sustain. Fromm becomes a preacher where he was an observer. This is a typical problem of the second half of the twentieth century. Whoever has precisely diagnosed the pathology of consumer society wants also to heal it. But the cure cannot be derived from the diagnosis. It would require something else.

V. An Old Tradition

Fromm is not the originator of the insight that needing less could be a form of wealth. He stands in a tradition as old as reflection on the good life itself. It is worth briefly recalling the stations of this tradition, because they show that the question is not modern and that its answer need not be specifically contemporary.

Socrates in the marketplace of Athens was one of the first to ask the question so precisely. He was no ascetic in the negative sense. He ate, drank, attended festivals, spoke with the beautiful. But he was free from experiencing what he desired as necessary. He could stop before the goods on display and extend the list of what he did not need. For him this list was not renunciation but wealth. Whoever needs little can experience much without being bound by what he experiences.

Diogenes radicalised the Socratic determination. He lived in a barrel, owned a cloak and a bowl, and when he saw a boy drinking from his cupped hand, he threw away the bowl. Diogenes is an extreme figure who appears to us today more as caricature than as model. But his point is valid: every possession I consider necessary is a place where the world can wound me. Whoever loses the cloak freezes. Whoever can do without the cloak cannot be wounded by its loss.

The Stoa systematised the insight. Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius described the same principle in different versions. What truly belongs to us is only what no one can take from us. Everything else — possessions, position, health, even beloved persons — is only on loan. Whoever understands this stops clinging to the things on loan, and thereby gains a freedom that cannot be damaged by any loss. This is not indifference. It is the opposite. It is the capacity to enjoy things without being possessed by them.

Early Christianity translated this Stoic insight into a religious language. The desert fathers, the monastic orders, the Franciscans institutionalised need-lessness as spiritual practice. This was not primarily asceticism from self-mortification. It was the practical realisation of the insight that the spiritual attention which apparently necessary things demand could be better deployed elsewhere. Whoever needs little has more attention for what he does.

Judaism institutionalised the Sabbath — one day a week on which the logic of acquiring, producing, and possessing is suspended. The Sabbath is the structural reminder that life does not consist in accumulation. It is a weekly intrusion of the being-modality into a world otherwise dominated by the having-modality. Whoever rests on the Sabbath practises what Fromm, two millennia later, would call for as a way of life.

Buddhism turned the insight into an existential philosophy. The teaching of tanha — of craving, of grasping, of clinging — says: the root of suffering is desire. Whoever desires cannot have the desired without having to continue desiring it. Whoever lets go of the desire itself gains something that could not be gained by reaching the desired. This is not passive desirelessness. It is the active liberation from a chain that devours life.

This tradition is not a Western particularity, and it is not a religious particularity. It is a human constant, developed independently in different cultures because it captures a truth about human existence that, under the conditions of modernity, has been buried but not abolished.

VI. The Algorithm of 2026

Fromm wrote in 1976 without knowing the algorithm that today has brought the having-modality into a form he could not have foreseen. The marketing character he described was stimulated through mass media — television advertising, posters, magazines. That was a coarse, visible, switch-off-able stimulation. Whoever turned off the television was free from the stimulation. Whoever did not buy the magazine did not see the advertising.

Today the stimulation is no longer coarse, no longer visible, no longer switch-off-able. It is algorithmically personalised, tailored in real time to the individual weaknesses of each user, and built into every screen we use. The smartphone algorithm knows, after three weeks of observation, in what mood we are most likely to buy a particular product, which images most likely seduce us, which words most likely reach us. It knows it more precisely than we know it ourselves. And it applies this knowledge not occasionally but in every waking hour we spend at the screen.

This situation is new. It is a qualitative change, not just a quantitative one. The having-modality was once brought to a person from outside — through advertising, through social comparison, through status symbols. Today it is built into the person — through the devices he can no longer set aside without exiting society. Whoever works in the modern professional world without a smartphone, without email, without digital presence, is not withdrawn but unemployed. The choice to remove oneself from the stimulation is no longer a choice. It is a social death.

This changes what to need little can mean today. It can no longer mean to have little, at least not in the outward form. Whoever wants to live with little today must own a smartphone, an apartment with internet access, a car or a train ticket, health insurance, pension insurance. The material lower limit of life in a modern society lies higher than the material upper limit in most historical societies. What remains is not the reduction of possession but the reduction of craving. That is a different operation. It is harder. It is more inward. It is directed at attention, not at the household.

VII. Enough Is More

The point that emerges from this consideration is not surprising, but it is seldom expressed in this form: whoever needs little has more of what he has. Whoever has much has less of what he has.

This formula requires explanation. It seems paradoxical, but it is not. Whoever needs little has not distributed his attention across the pursuit of the next thing. He can fully perceive what he has. He can taste the breakfast he eats, hear the conversation he is having, walk the path he is walking. He has time for what is happening because his time is not bound by what has not yet happened but should soon. His life is narrow in what it contains, but deep in what it contains.

Whoever has much has the opposite. His attention is distributed across the next step — the next deal, the next acquisition, the next position, the next status. What he is doing now is not what occupies him. What he has now is not what he is experiencing. His life is wide in what it could contain, but thin in what it does contain. He has much, but he does not really have it.

This observation is not moral. It is phenomenological. It describes a property of attention. Attention cannot be divided without losing its character. Whoever does two things attentively at once does neither of them attentively. Whoever has and at the same time wants-to-have does not have what he has. He has what he does not yet have, as lack. The wealth he possesses he cannot feel, because all his energy is directed at the wealth that is still missing.

VIII. A Trap the Argument Must Avoid

Whoever speaks for needing little risks tipping into a sermon of modesty that despises pleasure, sensual joy, breadth of life. That is not what is meant here, and it is not what Fromm meant, and it is not what the old tradition meant. The point is not less is better. The point is the source of wealth shifts.

The difference between enjoyment and consumption is essential here. Consumption is the use of an object by a subject who treats the object as a means to an end lying outside the object. Whoever consumes a meal does so to become full, to have energy, to drive off hunger, to spend not too much time eating, to get the meal done. Whoever enjoys a meal does so to experience the meal. Enjoyment is not means but end. It is what is happening, not what must happen in order for something else to happen.

Consumption needs accumulation. Whoever consumes needs constantly new objects, because the single object exhausts itself in consumption. Enjoyment needs no accumulation. Whoever enjoys can experience a single object so deeply that it contains a world. The opposite of consumption is not renunciation but attention. Whoever is attentive needs fewer objects to experience more world.

This is why to need little is not asceticism. Ascetics withdraw from the world. Whoever needs little in the sense meant here goes deeper into the world. He takes the little he has seriously enough actually to have it.

IX. The Structural Consequence

A society in which the having-modality dominates is not sustainable. That is the ecological lesson of the last fifty years. An economy based on constant growth cannot function on a finite planet. That is mathematically trivial and politically undisputed. But the consequence that follows is not drawn, because the having-modality cannot be changed by sermon. It is structurally anchored — in language, in institutions, in algorithms, in habits.

A society with being-modality is not reachable through political reform. It is reachable only through architecture that does not constantly stimulate the having-need. That is a difficult task. It requires that the devices we use are no longer optimised to absorb our attention. It requires that the economy we run is no longer optimised to generate new needs. It requires that the education we transmit is no longer aimed only at productivity but also at the capacity for enjoyment. It requires that the language we speak turns again to the verb.

None of these changes is foreseeable in the present situation. The economic logic of modern society is aligned with the first concept, and it will not change through insight. What can change is individual practice. Whoever recognises the second concept as valid can practise it in his own life, even when the society around him does not. This is no solution to the structural problem. But it is the preservation of a possibility that might otherwise be lost.

X. The Unresolved Question

Fromm did not name his book Being instead of Having, as the German translation suggests. He named it To Have or To Be? — a question. The German shortening transformed the question into a claim. But the question was more important than the claim. Fromm did not know whether the answer was possible. He held it open. He described what he recognised as the right direction as the right direction, without claiming that it could be reached.

This questioning posture is the substance of what remains to be thought. We do not know whether a society is possible that recognises the second concept as valid. We know that the present society does not. We know that individual practice is possible, with effort and difficulty, because the structural stimulation of the having-modality is everywhere. We know that the tradition which carried the second concept is not buried but can be passed on, in texts like this one, in conversations, in lived examples.

Whoever needs little is rich in a way that does not appear in the tables of statistics. Whoever has much and cannot feel his life is poor in a way that likewise does not appear in the tables. Both situations are real. Both have their consequences. The question which of the two situations is the more desirable each person answers in the practice of his life, whether he knows it or not. What this essay offers is only the possibility of seeing the question before answering it.

The world is not poor in things. The world is poor in attention. Whoever understands this has the wealth the world has to give.