Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

by Marshall McLuhan

Money, as a social means of extending and amplifying work and skill in an easily accessible and portable form, lost much of its magical power with the coming of representative money, or paper money. Just as speech lost its magic with writing, and further with printing, when printed money supplanted gold, the compelling aura of it disappeared. Samuel Butler in Erewhon (1872) gave clear indications in his treatment of the mysterious prestige conferred by precious metals. His ridicule of the money medium took the form of presenting the old reverent attitude to money in a new social context. This new kind of abstract, printed money of the high industrial age, however, simply would not sustain the old attitude: This is the true philanthropy. He who makes a colossal fortune in the hosiery trade, and by his energy has succeeded in reducing the price of woollen goods by the thousandth part of a penny in the pound — this man is worth ten professional philanthropists. So strongly are the Erewhonians impressed with this, that if a man has made a fortune of over £20,000 a year they exempt him from all taxation, considering him a work of art, and too precious to be meddled with; they say, “How very much he must have done for society before society could have been prevailed upon to give him so much money”; so magnificent an organization overawes them; they regard it as a thing dropped from heaven. “Money,” they say, “is the symbol of duty, it is the sacrament of having done for mankind ...