Money, power, sex, and recognition form the Mighty Tetrad of human motivators, the chief goads to action here below. But none of the four is evil or the root of all evil. People thoughtlessly and falsely repeat, time and again, that money is the root of all evil. Why not say that about power, sex, and recognition? The sober truth is that no member of the Mighty Tetrad is evil or the root of all evil. Each is ambiguous: a good liable to perversion.
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Hi Bill,
Nice essay. A question occurs: how are evil and love related?
As an aside, and by no means to impugn the rest of what you say, I thought that the actual expression is not, in fact, “money is the root of all evil”, but rather, “the love of money is the root of all evil.”
So “money is the root of all evil” is not an actual expression?
Doing a quick internet search, this page might give better context and some explanation of origin:
https://hermeneutics.stackexchange.com/questions/8223/1-timothy-610-for-the-love-of-money-is-the-root-of-all-kinds-of-evil