From: Buddhist Ethics and Modern Society, vol. 31: David Loy, “Buddhism and Money“
Our problem today is that we no longer believe in things but in symbols, hence our life has passed over into these symbols and their manipulation and then we find ourselves manipulated by the symbols we take so seriously. We are preoccupied not so much with what money can buy, but its power and status; not with a Mercedes-Benz in itself, but what owning a Mercedes says about us. Modern humanity would not be able to endure real economic equality, “because he has no faith in self-transcendent, otherworldly immortality symbols; visible physical worth is the only thing he has to give him eternal life.” Or real Being. Our spiritual hunger to become real, or at least to occupy a special place in the cosmos, has been reduced to having a bigger car than our neighbors! It seems that we cannot get rid of the sacred, because we cannot get rid of our ultimate concerns, except by repressing them, whereupon we become “the more uncontrollably driven by them.”