Money and Relationship Money establishes a relationship between people as buyers and sellers of goods. While everything economic is determined by money, this abstract relationship with money does more than shape people’s social context; it also affects personal relationships to their very core.
Individual
Money benchmarks everyone as an individual owner of money, and at the same time it positions the individual within the anonymous universe of all other people as money owners. This abstract reference forms a distinct instance of the “I” in everyone as a conceptually pure form of self. Accordingly the “I” as a psychological entity arose only in the modern era, under the reign of money.
Society
Every person must make or do something so that others will give him money. But he doesn’t exert himself for them because he knows them, and
they don’t pay him money because they want to contribute to his livelihood; rather everyone seeks his own ways of coming into money. A group so formed is not a community but an interrelation determined by money.
The world as environment
With the advent of modern capitalistic money, the world becomes an environment. The self-referential monetized individual sees itself as a singular interior element surrounded by an all-encompassing exterior. And so it is that monetized individuals regards the world as a mere externality, as if they themselves would not belong to it.
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