Money gets a bad reputation
We blame it for inequality, greed, corruption, for the slow erosion of our sense of community. In a world where billionaires hoard resources and the price of housing outpaces demand, it’s tempting to imagine a society without it. A cleaner, fairer system: perhaps one based on reputation, collective approval, or post-scarcity abundance.
But don’t be too quick to get rid of money. For all its flaws, money is one of the most merciful inventions in human history.
Not because it’s fair, but because it frees us from having to be known.
The Hidden Grace of Impersonality
Money is cold, yes, but that coldness is what makes it work. It doesn’t care about your personality, beliefs, charm, popularity, or history. You don’t have to be admired. You don’t have to be forgiven. You don’t even have to be liked.
You just pay.
This impersonality is not a defect. It’s what allows millions of people to cooperate without trust, without consensus, and without moral evaluation. It lets us live together without needing to belong to each other.
In a society without money, something else has to allocate value: reputation, character, loyalty, belief. But doesn’t that harden into social control? In a reputation-based world, your worth must be earned in the eyes of others, and once lost, it may never be regained. We see glimpses of this daily online, where a clumsy post or misunderstood moment can erase years of goodwill. Who knew going to a Coldplay concert could be so dangerous if you don’t have all your P’s and Q’s in order?
That world doesn’t liberate. It scrutinizes. It demands conformity. It makes no room for the strange, the sharp, the unliked.
If money is impersonal, reputation is intimate, and intimacy without mercy is tyranny.
A Species Wired for Judgment
Humans are not naturally tolerant. I imagine we evolved in small bands, alert to difference, primed to punish defectors. The slightest deviation, in language, belief, appearance, triggers suspicion. Our instincts are tribal, moralizing, and unforgiving.
What money did, miraculously, was offer a detour.
It gave us a system where you could interact without explaining yourself. Where you didn’t have to win favor to get fed. Where you could survive as yourself, even if you were strange, unwelcome, or alone. If there is a light in front of us, it’s that we can create something so off script, so indifferent to judgment, yet capable of holding society together.
A Quiet Kindness
So much of what we call civilization rests on the ability to live among people who do not love us, agree with us, or even know us, and still be allowed to exist, to trade, to move.
Money, for all its corruption and complexity, makes that possible.
It’s one of the rare human inventions that lets you be misunderstood and still participate. You don’t need to justify your past. You don’t need to be charming or correct or favored. You don’t need to be known.
You can simply act, and that is freedom.
In a species wired to notice difference, to police deviance, to crush the outlier for the safety of the group, money created a different path. A quiet detour around judgment. A system where value could be exchanged without a soul being weighed.
Don’t be too quick to get rid of it
Beneath the spreadsheets and scandals and gold-plated greed, there’s something strangely beautiful here, a collective myth that, for once, didn’t make the world more cruel, but made it bearable.
