Is Money a Four-Letter Word?

It seems fairly safe to say that many philosophers and psychologists of note sooner or later acknowledge the fact that miserliness and acquisitiveness are aberrations, if not neuroses, of men who have mistaken a means, namely, money, for an end. Aristotle, for example, says, “The life of money-making is a life of constraint; and wealth is obviously not the good of which we are in quest, for it is useful merely as a means to something else.”1 And Spinoza says, “But they who know the true use of money, and who fix the measure of wealth solely with regard to their actual needs, live content with little.”2 Plato was even more emphatic in his denunciation of money when he outlawed its existence in the class of philosophers who governed the Republic, though he allowed it in the lower classes because of their “baser” natures. Kant, too, wanted to distinguish between the “price” and the “dignity” of things, the latter being a nonnegotiable end-in-itself quality which should not be debased as a means to something else. Why is it that other thinkers, such as Marx, Freud, and even St. Paul, who said that “The love of money is the root of all evil” (Timothy 6:10), regard money as something to stick up their noses at?

It was Freud, of course, who believed that the reason is that money is crap—or rather sublimated crap. He believed that the adult love of money is basically a vestige of the infantile love of feces and that the stool play of the child becomes sublimated or refined into the money play of the adult. In his investigations into the human mind he claimed that there was always an intimate association between the anal habits of a child and the later money policies of that child as an adult. Children who derived pleasure from refusing to empty their bowel grew up to become people who exhibited the