Money yields unlimited mastery because it resists the resistance of concrete objects
Evidence
At the cost of not obtaining things and of renouncing all the specific satisfactions that are tied to particulars, money can provide a sense of power far enough removed from actual empirical objects that it is not subject to the limitations imposed by possession of them. Money alone do we own completely and without limitations. It alone can be completely incorporated into the use which we plan for it. — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 449
Categorization
- XREF: Parallel to blasé attitude: both money and blasé detachment grant a frictionless, abstract mastery over a world refused in its concrete particulars. — connects to: Money makes desire instantly operative, dissolving the technical distance to objects
Related
- Money makes desire instantly operative, dissolving the technical distance to objects (similarity 0.87)
- Money functions as magic, making desire immediately effective (similarity 0.81)
- Money lets people do things their individual powers cannot (similarity 0.79)
- Money erases qualitative distinctions by reducing everything to quantity (similarity 0.78)
- The money economy makes social action approach pure objectivity (similarity 0.78)
- Money is transferable freedom deferring choices of when, with whom, and for what. (similarity 0.78)