money is the form of intellectual energy in which the ruler will, the political and social, technical and mental, creative power, the craving for a full-sized life, are concentrated - Shaw is entirely right when he says: "the universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact in our civilization ... the two things [money and life] are inseparable: money is the counter that enables life to be distributed socially: it is "life" - what is here described as Civilization, then, is the stage of a Culture at which tradition and personality have lost their immediate effectiveness, and every idea, to be actualized, has to be put into terms of money - at the beginning a man was wealthy because he was powerful - now he is powerful because he has money.
... intellect reaches the throne only when money puts it there ... democracy is the completed equating of money with political power.
through the economic history of every culture there runs a desperate conflict waged by the soil-rooted tradition of a race, by its soul, against the spirit of money ... money aims at mobilizing all things - world-economy is the actualized economy of values that are completely detached in thought from the land, and made fluid - [the increasing intensity of this thinking appears in the economic picture as a growth of the available money-mass, which is abstract and imagined and has nothing to do with the visible supply of gold as ware -- the demonetization (deprived of value) -- the "stiffening" of the money-market, for example, is a purely intellectual process played out in the hands of a small handful of men ... the only steady element is the fact that quantity of money - not to be confused with the stock of tokens and the means of payment - is an alter ego mirroring thought in money]. -- [Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, 17th printing 1981; Volume II - Perspectives of World History, 1922]
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