Everything's Made Up and the Points Don't Matter: Money, Desire, and Idolatry

He was a full professor of German literature (while I was still a doc student and English conversation instructor), a generation or more older than me, a brilliant guitarist, and the leader of the small rockabilly blues band I was in. “Paul,” he said during a smoke break from one of our studio sessions, “you’re Christian, so you know the story of Joseph and Pharaoh’s dreams. That’s where money as securities comes from.” I had no idea what he was talking about. “The story of Joseph is about the invention of the system of credit and stored abundance.”

Whether he was historically right has never been the part that interested me. What stayed with me was the idea that money is not simply a means of exchange. I'd never really thought about money very deeply before. Like most people, I mostly focused on wanting more of it. But once I started looking at money through his eyes the biblical warnings about wealth and the love love money began to look less like moral suspicion and more like psychological insight. What if money is uniquely dangerous not because of what it is, but because of how it shape us?

In the biblical narrative, Joseph’s plan was to store grain during the fat years to hedge against the famine to come. However, you can only hoard so much grain. It rots, it’s heavy, it takes cities to hold it, and it’s only worth anything to someone who happens to want grain. So the abundance gets translated into something more portable: a claim on the grain, a promise of access, security you can carry without touching a single kernel.

That claim needs one more translation. To move freely between people, it has to become currency, a token any of them will accept. And once it does, something strange happens. The grain has gone from abundance, to stored security, to a freely circulating token, and at the end of that chain it has come loose from grain altogether. Money floats on its own, an empty signifier that can promise almost anything.

That’s the thing worth sitting with. Money is not really an object in itself. It’s a record of stored abundance, grain abstracted into a promise against future lack. And once it’s a promise rather than a pile of grain, it can circulate, accumulate, and be desired on its own, long after anyone remembers the harvest it stood for. The substitution doesn’t just change how we use it. It changes what it does to us.

Victory points in a board game follow the same path. They’re meaningless by themselves and yet indispensable within the game. Outside the game and the rules that invent them, they’re just words you can toss around, points on Whose Line Is It Anyway, where everything’s made up and the points don’t matter. When the game ends, they go back in the box. During the game, though, they mean everything. They shape desire toward what counts, assigning value to certain actions, tokens, or states of the board. In the middle of a game I feel the thrill of gaining one and the sting of losing one, abstract symbols that will vanish the moment we stop playing.

And a victory point can stand for anything: power, prestige, conquest, even the quality of a wildlife habitat. That’s exactly what makes it useful. Because it means nothing in itself, it can mean whatever the game needs it to. Money makes the same move. It is infinitely interchangeable, and so, finally, empty. But that emptiness is not a defect. It’s what lets our desire pour in and fill it with the fantasy of anything.

And here is what makes it dangerous. The wanting never actually ends. Each point won only sharpens the appetite for the next; each purchase clears just enough room for the next longing. Nothing finally satisfies, because satisfaction was never really the point. Money is uniquely suited to hide this from us, because it is always pointing past itself to something else. If the millions didn’t make me happy, the problem must be that I bought the wrong thing. Obviously not that the millions were never capable of it.

Gambling highlights this connection between victory points and money in important ways. When I win at Settlers, the fantasy is real but bounded. I am in my mind, during the game, the shrewd master of a little cardboard island, and then the box closes and the island is gone. The points never pretended to be anything but themselves.

Poker chips make a bigger promise. They look like the same kind of empty token, plastic discs standing in for imaginary value, but they don’t stay inside the game. They get cashed out. And because of that, the fantasy they carry doesn’t end when the hand does. It reaches past the table toward the thing money always gestures at: a transformed life, security, success, prestige. That’s at least part of what can keep a person in the chair long after the fun has drained out of it: the fantasy the chips point to and never deliver. The next hand is always the one where it finally comes good.

Unlike almost every other object, money never has to bear the burden of disappointing us. If the new phone leaves you unhappy, the next one will finally do it. Money quietly survives each disappointment because it was never the object of desire. It merely promised access to the next object. Every failure becomes evidence not that the fantasy was mistaken, but that we just bought the wrong thing.

Perhaps that’s why the Biblical authors wrote so much about money and its pursuit. The danger isn’t simply greed. It’s that money is uniquely capable of carrying whatever fantasy we pour into it. It promises security to the fearful, prestige to the ambitious, freedom to the trapped, pleasure to the lonely. Because it means almost nothing by itself, it can appear to mean almost everything. That’s what makes it such a perfect idol. It’s not just that it asks for our worship, but that it quietly offers to become whatever we already believe will save us, helping us double down on our own self-deception. To love money is to pursue a falsehood.

And here’s where I’d recommend that you pay more attention to those offhand comments from friends that stick with you. My bandmate handed me a thought on a smoke break, and I’ve been chewing on it for years. Joseph didn’t invent stored abundance. But his story helped me see why money can hold me the way it does, despite every warning in the biblical text and every wisdom tradition I know. Money never seems to fail me the way other things do, because money is never the thing itself. It’s always the promise of the thing, always pointing past itself to the next purchase, the next game, the next raise that will finally make me whole. Meaningless on its own, it becomes the perfect vessel for everything I cannot quite say I long for. And it never has to answer for what it can’t deliver, because money was never the destination, only ever the vehicle.

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