Science & Tech Quote by Norman O. Brown

Brown goes for the jugular by treating money not as a neutral tool but as a psychologically charged fetish, and he does it with a deliberately disgusting metaphor. The money-excrement equation is bait: it shocks you into noticing what polite economics works hard to hide, that currency is a kind of socially deodorized waste product. We handle it, hoard it, feel ashamed and proud about it, pass it around, pretend it is clean. The vulgarity is the point. If money can be linked to what the body expels, then the “dignity” of finance starts to look like an elaborate act of repression.

His jab at psychoanalysis is double-edged. On one hand, Freud’s provocation becomes a credential: psychoanalysis is “scientific” precisely because it says out loud what culture already half-knows. On the other, Brown demotes the science by suggesting it merely formalizes what “common sense and the poets” have always grasped. The line flatters art as the older, truer diagnosis.

“Absolute worthlessness” is the master stroke. Brown isn’t claiming money is useless; he’s arguing its power depends on emptiness. Money must be indifferent to any particular object so it can stand in for all objects. Its authority is pure abstraction, a sign that refers only to collective belief and the anxious rituals that maintain it. In the postwar era of expanding consumer culture and growing suspicion of bourgeois “seriousness,” Brown’s intent is to puncture the sanctity of value itself: the more we treat money as sacred substance, the more we reveal it’s a symbolic convenience we’re terrified to admit we invented.