"The paradox of accounting is that the act of evaluation, the practice that matters most, becomes subordinated to the practice of making money, a representation of evaluation. To liberate evaluation from its representation, it is necessary to assume that true value resists accounting. Far from being represented by a price or possessed as a property, true value is that which can never be mastered. Only in a culture governed by money is it possible to imagine that there are no true values. In reality, there is no need for skepticism regarding the existence of value, for thought itself lives and moves in the element of value. Thought does not represent, project, or sense value as something external to it; thought is concentrated attention and as such is attracted and distracted by that which seems to matter. Value is not so much external to thought as it is the environment in which thought orientates itself. Indeed, when thought encounters resistance, problems and obstacles, when it is attracted by what is significant and problematic, it meets a value for which it cannot account. For example, thought is attracted by economic opportunities and misfortunes. These, the events that feed economic life, cannot generally be taken into account, for they have an unknowable value. They lack a publicly agreed price."
Philip Goodchild Theology of Money (2009) p.185
