The problem is that these two things should be aligned.

Money is an exchange for value, a medium that acts as a representation of worth.

A philosophy that preaches money as evil or, conversely, as one sees money in and of itself (eg: “he’s only good for the money”) cannot wish to have virtue. And as the society breaks into low trust, it will eventually loose the value the money was supposed to represent like a tree with rotted roots.

This is the “ghost” side of the mind-body dichotomy.

Likewise a society that steals and befrauds, debases its currency, and rewards “schemes” and “hustles” with money has inverted cause and effect. Equally, this society will ALSO collapse into low trust as “get rich quick” schemes and throw away junk become the norm and things simply don’t work anymore because there is no human value (via work) being added to the system to maintain the value of the money being stolen.

This is the “zombie” side of the mind-body dichotomy.

“A body without a mind is a zombie. A mind without a body is a ghost. Both are symbols of death”—Ayn Rand

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That’s an insightful way to frame it. The “mind body dichotomy” you mention ties closely to how modern economies split value (money) from meaning (purpose). I’d argue that purpose driven work seeks to reunite those two, bringing together mind and body, meaning and material.

When work serves both human fulfillment and fair exchange, money regains its integrity as a reflection of genuine contribution, not manipulation.

Purpose doesn’t reject money; it restores its meaning.

I’d argue the same: that purpose driven work is supposed to merge the spiritual (mind) and material (body) towards the same purpose via incentive, which is the point of properly executed capitalism. The failures are part government and part cultural and must be addressed on both levels to correct this bifurcation.

Don’t give me too much credit though: much of what I said was from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, specifically from Francisco D’Anconia’s famous “meaning of money” speech.

Boy does she have some issues on tabula rasa, rejection of evolution as a system, and thinking that agoristic “strikes” (the working title for atlas shrugged”) would result in anything other than Waco/Ruby ridge. But her epistemology and ethical validation of capitalism are some of the most important contributions to philosophy in the last 100 years.