Between Thoughts -Intellectual Musings

Money=Freedom

The Money Myths That Keep Us Small

Ask a South African what they earn and watch the temperature of the room change faster than load shedding hits. We will discuss politics at a braai until the coals go cold. We will argue religion, load shedding, the national team’s coaching staff, even our exes. But money,  what you actually take home, what you owe, what you’re worth,  stays locked in a drawer nobody opens.

The discomfort, in numbers.
Only 40–44% of adults feel comfortable talking about money with friends. About 52% will discuss it with family. Across almost every financial health study I’ve read, personal finance beats out politics, religion, and sex as the single hardest topic for people to talk about. That silence is not an accident. It’s manufactured, and it’s costing us. So before we get to why economic freedom matters to South Africans specifically, I want to take apart the stories that keep the silence in place,  the stories that taught us money was somehow beneath us, or beside the point, or a thing that only corrupts.

Why the Silence Exists?
Money is never just arithmetic. It is bound up with survival, identity, and where you sit in the pecking order, and that’s what makes it so hard to discuss out loud.
Identity and self-worth: most of us subconsciously equate net worth with self-worth, so exposing an income or a debt figure risks being read as a verdict on our character.
Social comparison: a number reveals your exact place in the hierarchy, the “Joneses effect” guarantees somebody feels inadequate and somebody else feels resentful.
Cultural taboo: many of us were raised believing that asking about money is vulgar, and that habit follows us straight into boardrooms and marriages.
Shame and avoidance: debt and thin savings trigger a private sense of failure, and staying quiet feels safer than confronting it.
Literacy gaps: if nobody ever taught you the vocabulary, silence protects you from sounding uneducated.

Every one of those is a defence mechanism. And defence mechanisms, left unexamined, harden into myths,  the comforting stories we tell children and ourselves so that the silence feels like wisdom rather than fear.

The Myths We Were Fed.
I grew up on these lines, and I’d guess you did too. They sound noble. They are, mostly, false  or at least far more conditional than the version we were handed.

“Money Doesn’t Buy Happiness”
The old ceiling on this claim was $75,000 a year, earn more than that and, supposedly, extra money stops moving the needle on your happiness. More recent, more granular research has knocked that ceiling down. Life satisfaction keeps climbing with income on a logarithmic curve, with no plateau in sight even well beyond $500,000 a year. Higher income tracks with lower daily stress and more frequent positive emotion. And money does something specific: it buys you a buffer. It absorbs the shock of a medical emergency, a legal dispute, a sudden retrenchment, the kind of blow that would otherwise flatten you.

“Money Doesn’t Buy Love”
It can’t manufacture affection, that part is true. But financial strain is one of the most reliable predictors of divorce we have, across income brackets and cultures. People with higher incomes marry more often and separate less. And resource security remains a heavily weighted factor in long-term partner selection everywhere researchers have looked. Love may not be for sale, but its survival is subsidised.

“You Don’t Need Money to Build a Google or a Tesla”
The garage-startup story is the most romanticised outlier in business mythology. Google’s foundational algorithm was funded by National Science Foundation grants. Tesla survived its near-death production years on massive venture capital and a $465 million U.S. Department of Energy loan. Training a competitive AI model today costs hundreds of millions of dollars in compute alone. Innovation at that scale has never been bootstrapped,  it has always required foundational capital before there was anything to sell.
“Genius is distributed evenly. Opportunity is not.”

“Hard Work Alone Guarantees Success”
Worker productivity has climbed for decades while real wages for most people stagnated. Capital compounds faster than wages ever will,  returns on assets consistently outrun growth in earnings from labour. And globally, the people working the longest, most punishing hours are statistically clustered in the lowest income brackets. Effort matters. It is not, on its own, the engine we were told it was.

“The Best Entrepreneurs Are Broke Risk-Takers”
The average founder of a high-growth startup is 42, not a destitute 19-year-old. Most draw on personal networks, family wealth, or home equity to cover the lean years. Wealthy founders can gamble because their baseline survival was never on the table,  if the business fails, they don’t. That’s not risk-taking. That’s risk-taking with a net.

“Money Corrupts”
The Scrooge story has it backwards. Real altruism requires surplus,  the people funding medical research, climate work, and large-scale education infrastructure are disproportionately high-net-worth individuals. Scarcity, not abundance, is what narrows people to short-term survival thinking and erodes their capacity for anyone else’s problems.

To South Africans: Why Economic Freedom Is the Freedom We Haven’t Finished Winning
This is where the myth-busting stops being an intellectual exercise and becomes personal, because we are a country that fought for and won political freedom, freedom of movement, and the legal end of apartheid  and then largely stopped there, as if the job was done.
Rights require resources. A right to move means little if you cannot afford the taxi fare.
Political freedom gives you the right to vote. Freedom of movement gives you the right to walk anywhere in the country. But without economic freedom, both of those rights are mostly theoretical. Choice requires capital,  poverty narrows your options down to daily survival, no matter what the constitution says you’re entitled to. And dignity requires autonomy; relying indefinitely on grants or charity just swaps one form of restriction for another.

Apartheid Was an Economic System First.
It was designed, deliberately, to strip land, wealth, and skills from the Black majority. Ending the political apartheid stopped the state from writing new racist laws. It did not automatically undo the economic damage those laws had already done. Wealth outlives legislation — financial inequality keeps passing down through generations unless something actively interrupts it. Spatial segregation persists, too: without financial power, the working-class majority stays trapped in underfunded townships, far from where the jobs actually are. Real redress means South Africans owning land, housing, and shares,  not just receiving services from a government that was never resourced to be everyone’s only provider.

A Democracy Cannot Survive on Empty Stomachs.
Political freedom is fragile when the citizens holding it are economically desperate. When people are poor, demagogues find it easy to buy votes or weaponise anger against democratic institutions. A stable democracy needs a self-sufficient middle class that can actually hold government accountable, not out of fear of losing a grant, but from a position of independence. High unemployment and inequality don’t stay contained; they show up as crime, protest, and infrastructure damage that eventually reaches everyone, regardless of suburb.

Sovereignty Without Ownership Is Incomplete.
A country isn’t fully independent if its citizens don’t control its economic engines. Economic freedom is what lets local entrepreneurs and industrial innovators compete globally and bring wealth home, instead of the country running permanently as a consumer of foreign goods and a borrower of foreign debt. That shift,  from dependent to self-sustaining,  is the unfinished part of our liberation.

Umuntu Ngumuntu Ngabantu  and a Bank Account.
Ubuntu teaches that a person is a person through other people. It has never taught that a person should be perpetually broke through other people. Community and capital are not opposites,  a community with resources can actually afford to be generous, patient, and long-term in how it cares for its own. A community with nothing is forced into short-term survival thinking, no matter how strong its values are.

So talk about money. Teach your children the vocabulary you were never given. Build the asset, not just the salary. And stop mistaking the absence of chains for the presence of freedom,  imali yinkululeko, money is freedom, and we have work still to do.
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Dr. Mzamo Masito

Between Thoughts- Intellectual Musings.

Where the uncomfortable questions get a seat at the table.