When There Are No Values, Money Counts
Myron Magnet
MONEY, MONEY, MONEY is the incantation of today. Bewitched by an epidemic of money enchantment, Americans in the Eighties wriggle in a St. Vitus's dance of materialism unseen since the Gilded Age or the Roaring Twenties...
The point is not that the money society has triumphantly driven out all the solid, estimable values, like the shaggy barbarians at the gates of Rome. Rather, the money society has expanded to fill the vacuum left after the institutions that embodied and nourished those values - community, religion, school, university, and especially family - sagged or collapsed or sometimes even self-destructed.
Now we live in a world where all values are relative, equal, and therefore without authority, truly matters of mere style. Says Dee Hock, former chief of the Visa bank-card operation: "It's not that people value money more but that they value everything else so much less -not that they are more greedy but that they have no other values to keep greed in check. They don't know what else to value". Or as University of Pennsylvania sociologist E. Digby Baltzell puts it: "When there are no values, money counts..."
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Excerpted from an article entitled The Money Society by Myron Magnet
which appeared in the July 6th 2023 issue of Fortune Magazine.