The word money is believed to have originated with the Roman temple of Juno Moneta, which also served as the ancient city’s mint. Therefore, in the collective consciousness, it was entity in the culture from which all relationships were derived, aside from familial relationships and friendships. Certainly the system of commerce was still heavily dependent upon local bartering, but the minting of money represented the advancement of a culture.
Having the mint located in a religious house of worship, in a society where religion and government were intertwined, reinforced the authority of the emerging system of value exchange.
“Moneta,” in turn, is supposed to derive either from the Latin word monere, which means to “remind,” “warn,” or “instruct”—or possibly from the Greek word moneres, which means “alone” or “unique.”
How Money Defines our Identity
More than anything else in our culture, the concept of money is the most consistent, persistent source of self-identification. For the majority of people, money represents freedom, as it always has, simply because money provides the resources to facilitate a myriad of pursuits.
If you do not like your job, yet you do not have enough money to quit and pursue something else, you feel trapped. However, if you do have enough money to take the leap toward pursuing a more fulfilling occupation, money can be liberating.
Money can buy you the time to try your hand at becoming an artist, or a musician, a stay-at-home parent, or a self-employed entrepreneur. Money gives us autonomy. If we have enough of it not to be reliant on other people’s financial support, then we can be more confident that our decision-making is independent and pure.
Money can give us a sense of wellbeing, power, superiority, emotional stability, and inner peace. And money can give us flexibility—flexibility to choose how, where, with who, and to what level of luxury we live our lives.
Today, earning and spending our money as we see fit are rights we enjoy as participants in the free market of a democratic society. Still, it was not always this way.
In ancient Greece, for a long time, wealth was measured in the form of property and land, which was in the hands of the aristocracy. Land and power were inseparable. The aristocrats believed in a closed society wherein the “best” (aristos) people embraced tradition and conservatism, and rejected meritocracy as too radical. Anyone who could transcend his birthright by acquiring more wealth and value, merely by working hard, was considered too great a threat to the aristocracy’s power.
If a person’s intelligence and capabilities—rather than his ancestry or feudal status—were the more widespread measure of power and success, then every man could become a kind of king, and a very wealthy one at that. This concept of a meritocracy was quite threatening. Therefore, money, as in the commodity sense of the concept in the form of land holdings, was a powerful psychological tool for stratifying the entire society.