Thoughts Personal & Superpersonal 
On Money

489 words

Editor’s Note:

The following text is an excerpt from a collection of unpublished notes entitled “Thoughts Personal and Superpersonal,” transcribed and annotated by Kerry Bolton. The title of the selection is mine.

Money. The well-known American orientation to money, according to which everything is assessed in terms of dollars and cents, including religion, art, politics, social life, and individual life, does not arise from greed and covetousness. These things are human, not national. The method of comparing all things with one standard is simply an expression of the uniformity of America: this uniformity is adjusted to a very low level, specifically to the animal level of man, the plane of which health, happiness and comfort are what relegates problems. But all of these problems—and there are no others in America—can be easily resolved in terms of the great money common denominator. To an American—whose acquaintance with, say, the aesthetic side of the Western Culture is as slight in comparison with a European as would be that of a present-day-European in comparison with a European of the Rococo—it is no strain of the mind to assess Frans Hals[1] and Ruysdael[2] in terms of money. To him these things come under the heading of “beautiful surroundings,” in other words, comfort.

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Three different orientations to money: American, English, German.

• To the American, money is life.
• To the Englishman, (the true Englishman, a type now almost extinct, the historical Englishman) money was culture.
• To a true Prussian-German, money is preservation.

The whole German economy, even though it still uses money—I am speaking of course, of the Third Reich—is a symbolic attempt to defeat money.[3] The effort of German social creations is to make the amount of money an individual receives directly proportionate to his needs. The only role played by money in the process is that of facilitating it. Money dispenses with the administration that would be necessary to operate a non-money economy.[4]

In England, need never played any part in the money-outlook. The aim of everyone was to have as much as possible. As long as the upper stratum retained its sense of a world-mission, this concept of money-as-culture (culture means here: higher life) did no damage; it effected no degeneration. Granted, it ruined the lower classes, but they did not matter to the world-mission.

Notes