Why are our contemporary societies so fascinated by money? Why do they make the possession of this money the supreme value? How can we explain that our civilization has sunk to such an extent into the religion of the god of money, at the risk of the worst inequalities and of the destruction of the planet? To understand this, we should probably start by recalling that money does indeed have something akin to a god… When we speak of the “god of money”, it is not a simple expression, it is not, unfortunately, a simple image, but something that refers to the immense power of money, a power that fascinates us because it resembles, in a very disturbing way, the power that our imaginations have attributed to all the gods of all the religions: the power to do everything, to make everything possible, to create everything – in short, an absolute power that is that of omnipotence… This is why money exerts on us this fascination: like the all-powerful gods, it holds out to us the image of omnipotence! And it is even more formidable… because money seems to have an advantage over these gods of the different religions. Because the omnipotence that we lend to it seems much more concrete than that of the gods, it is an omnipotence that men can seize – the omnipotence that money designates seems accessible, whereas the omnipotence of the gods will always escape us… Thanks to money, men delude themselves into living the life of the gods… What the subjugated followers of the religion of the money god express by saying: “Everything has a price”, “everything can be bought, it is enough to put the price there”.
It is perhaps not inappropriate to point out that a French publisher has just published a bilingual version of “Genealogy of the Money-God” which presents itself as a radical destruction of this cult.