"If money arouses so much anger, it is perhaps because it incarnates the very essence of modernity. It personifies flux versus permanence, the genius of circulation versus the demon of petrification, and it pushes people to want to improve their lot. In addition, it reduces the human condition to the sinister tonalities of calculation. If we believe the critics, a "quantitative ethics" is everywhere replacing the sense of quality, and life will henceforth bend under the gray mass of anonymous numbers. We weigh, we count, instead of savoring. Over time, money, a simple instrument of exchange that makes it possible to acquire goods, becomes the supreme good, "desired in itself and by itself" (John Stuart Mill). It bears man's desire for the infinite as a cloud bears a storm. The means becomes the end, the tool surpasses its use and arouses the desire to earn as much as possible.!
Pascal Bruckner The Wisdom of Money (2017) p.40
