Grounds I — A Criterion Deemed Suspect, Yet Used to Judge

Wealth is routinely judged as morally suspect. And yet it is precisely on this criterion that a society decides who deserves to be heard, believed, taken seriously. This text explains that contradiction — and why it makes the silence imposed on money harder to justify than it seems.

Four ideas, one at a time

1. Greed has historically ranked among the gravest faults

In the Christian tradition, avaritia — the excessive desire for wealth — counts among the seven capital sins, alongside pride or wrath. Medieval canon law even forbade lending at interest, usury, because profiting from money itself seemed deeply suspect. This is not a recent or marginal idea: distrust of enrichment runs through centuries of moral history.

2. That same criterion became the framework of our societies

Regardless of this ancient moral condemnation, a person's economic position today determines, more than almost any other factor, whether they will be heard, believed, taken seriously, or forgiven for their failures. This is not a judgment on rich or poor individuals — it is an observation about what society has chosen as the foundation of its social organization.

3. This contradiction has no author — it is simply never confronted

This is not a lie consciously organized by anyone. Sociologist Michael Billig speaks of an ideological dilemma: a society can hold several incompatible values at once, invoking each separately depending on context, without ever placing them side by side. "Money is suspect" and "money determines your place" thus coexist without ever meeting in the same statement.

4. The discomfort touches both sides

Being visibly poor exposes one to suspicion. Being visibly rich exposes one to a more discreet unease — that of having profited from a criterion the same society claims to condemn in principle. Neither position is comfortable, precisely because this criterion was never supposed to be the foundation in the first place.

What we want to point out, in three sentences

1. A society cannot declare money morally suspect while using it to decide who deserves respect and credibility.

2. This contradiction is never resolved — it stays in the blind spot, for those who lack money as much as for those who have it.

3. Speaking openly about one's economic situation is therefore not a matter of propriety to observe — it is pointing to a founding contradiction that society prefers never to face.