In the New York Times, Simon Critchley argues, “There is a theological core to money based on an act of faith, of belief”:
Plato defines a “simulacrum” as something that materializes an absence, an image for something that doesn’t exist in reality, for example the god Poseidon or Bob the Builder. Such is money, in my view. In the absence of any gold standard (but ask yourself, how real is the value of gold? Is it not simply yellowish metal?), money is only sustained through an act of faith, belief, promise and trust in sovereign power.
To push this a little further, we might say that in the seemingly godless world of global finance capitalism, money is the only thing in which we really must have faith. Money is the one, true God in which we all believe. It is this faith that we celebrate in our desire for commodities, in the kind of fetishistic control that they seem to have over us. It’s not so much that we revere the things that money can buy. Rather, we venerate the money that enables us to buy those things. In the alluring display of shiny brands that cover the marketplace, it is not so much branded objects that we desire, but rather those objects insofar as they incarnate a quantifiable sum of money.
Read the full column here.