I'm not a huge fan of the whole "money is the root of all evil" saying, at least in terms of constructive discourse. Though tossing it out to get a quick lick in, such as in Pink Floyd's "Money," especially within the context of a greater work, works just fine.
For one thing, saying something is "the root" suggests that it is the causal end of the line, so to speak, which can be quite useful rhetorically to draw attention to something, but then shuts down discussion past that thing. And money is just too interesting and strange to stop the discussion there. Secondly, the notion of "evil;" well, another potentially useful rhetorical tool, and another symbol that covers up quite the rabbit hole. Somewhere the ghost of Nietzsche is stroking his huge moustache and wagging his finger.
Nevertheless, there is a unique set of dynamics involved in money relations, which often have the tendency of complicating the course of historical traumas and deepening them, along with other unfortunate and destructive tendencies. Thus we get the "root of all evil" refrain.
Take the long series of depressions and financial panics that characterize the history of the West, which oftentimes get steadily worse and larger and precipitate other catastrophes like wars. There are too many instances in history to count in which some tentative and fragile socio-political healing process is taking place, or else multiple well-intentioned parties are attempting to navigate some particularly tense and fraught state of affairs, and then the next big depression hits and then the most violent and aggressive elements of a given conflict rise to the top and gain dominance in growing cycles of violence which don't tend to abate until they burn themselves out.
Within the rise and fall of these manias and depressions, there is a particularly brutal logic at play in the exchange of money, and its accumulation and then its draining out: give me what I want and you can get what you want, and if I don't get what I want, you can go to hell.
You see in times of manic expansion and development the rapid circulation of money and its augmentation within the regions of development, where it seeks outward and intermingles with other money forms in trade, whispering its manifold promises disconnected to everything except its own augmentation and expansion, and which, after its inevitable overshoot, violently contracts, denying it ever promised anything at all, whispering to its carriers: "you're all on your own now."
Indeed, the intense desire of money and even addiction to money can be seen as, in a way, an addiction to faithlessness in the nurturing body of the earth and a forsaking of trust in people as people.
There is a trust in money, but that trust is buttressed by the awareness that the money is unconditionally good: that anyone anywhere can accept it in most circumstances for most things, and so the many and prickly trials and tribulations of engendering and maintaining trust amongst disparate individuals can be bypassed altogether, which is a large part of what makes money so irresistible. That money-trust implies a trust in the institutions that back it, which implies a trust in the state monopoly of violence which obliterates any sort of possibility of human-scale trust (and its betrayal, we should be clear) through sheer brute force.
Money then is the approximate symbol or cipher for a greater and more general set of complex social relations, for how individuals in a complex civilization relate to one another, which, as a multitude, are melted down and fused into a currency: to trace it is to make out a rough outline of how the societies that it passes through relate to each other, and also how these societies relate to each other through individuals. But then at the scale and complexity of modern civilization, is anything else possible? Maybe so, but not in our current timeline as things are constituted.
The movement and shape of these people relations could really only be held by deep, widely held, and enduring religious sensibilities, which ultimately can be seen as experiences on the individual level as movements of a greater social body which is organizing itself to achieve coherence and persist. In the West, the money relation seems to have arisen out of the wealth accumulation taking place amongst the old Christian currencies of religious thought and practice, which eventually eclipsed and supplanted them, and which now drive the logic of Western development.
We look back and puzzle over the waves upon waves of cyclic slaughter in the religious wars of the Middle Ages, or we wrinkle our brows and wring our hands over the ritual sacrifice of the Aztecs, and then at the same time throw our hands up in the course of a depression, as scores upon scores of people are thrown out of work and made destitute, and then crushed under starvation, disease, and deaths of despair, and then mumble something about this being the way the world works, letting these waves of social devastation happen while clear and completely possible alternatives exist. And this happens to this day.
In the United States, we struggle with cascades of crises, the money accumulating and sloshing from one catastrophe to the next, those movements growing larger and more destructive. Take the current terminal dysfunction of the American political system, which choked with flows of donor money, is unable to actually govern, save for continuing the momentum of accumulation of those flows to their sources, and the vetoing of any sort of redirection of those flows, draining the rest of the body politic of the resources it needs to govern itself, so that the huge unwieldy flows are to do a bulk of the governing, leaving further trails of destruction in their wake.
A large portion of this dynamic is attributable to a complex of fervent, religious convictions on the individual level, emanating from those in power but internalized still in much of the populace: of what money is, how it is created, how it is to flow and who and where it should flow to for what reason.
To repeat, this worship of money - a disembodied entity which unconditionally bestows its blessings on whoever can seek it out and accumulate it - has gone on for quite some time.
We could use an outsider perspective, which through its contrast, could shed some additional light on the phenomenon. Where throughout the frontiers of the early United States, settlers were vigorously seeking out gold veins and digging them up, the Lakota were just as vigorously seeking to keep them buried. In the Black Hills, the Lakota guarded their fatal secret by threatening execution to their own members if anyone revealed the location of the gold to the settlers. They knew what the settlers were after, and they knew they wouldn't stop, and at the same time, they had no use for the gold within the context of their own society.
Even the Aztecs, who were quite enamored with gold themselves, but for very different reasons, were surprised at the voraciousness and the bottomlessness of the conquistadors' desire for gold. Little did they know that giving Cortez and his crew some gold - in the hopes of appeasement - was like casting chum in shark-infested waters, which would bring down a divine-like wrath on their entire civilization for the sake of that substance.
If only they had known that the howling, existential anxiety in their hearts about the tenuousness of their place on the earth - which partially gave rise to their practice of ritual sacrifice, which steadily grew in pitch with the advancement of their destruction - was a similar anxiety animating the European scramble for gold, seeking it out to shovel into their treasuries like one shovels coal into a fire against the encroaching cold. Well, they might have been a little more circumspect, though I'm not sure that it would have altered the outcome much.
