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Steelmanning "Money is Important": Society has a few mechanisms for social control. Guilt, shame, "Follow the will of God", and most importantly, holding a gun to someone's head. i.e Threat of Violence.

Money allows you to delegate reach. When all you have is threat of violence as a coordination mechanism, you're limited to physical vicinity. Money can coordinate across continents and cultures.

Because so much of modern life is delegated, there needs to be a Strong mechanism of control. The reason we can own a house, or stuff in general, is because the person managing the piece of paper that says what belongs to who is scared of losing their source of money.

A vagabond hippie mountain guru is the opposite of a shining beacon of responsibility. You can't tether anything to the untethered and you need tethers to solidify reality. The core heart of society is the faith that Social Reality is Important and Should Be Maintained.

that wall street is (stereotypically) full of "greedy traders" is a feature, not a bug. If the people running a system that requires money to be important don't care about money, then that system collapses.

It's like holding a nerf gun to someone's head: "You'd better make smart decisions or else I'll shoot this foam dart at you!"

The more you care about money, the more effective you are within a society that controls via money. You're more sensitive to the environmental signals. There's strong correlation to greedy behavior and greedy individuals but also correlation with 'higher-level' macro experts.

Because of money's proximity to the Threat of Violence mechanism, it feels 'dirtier' than other mechanisms of control. We killed god, so the opposite of coordination via money is coordination via ideals. E.g. politics and say the BLM movement.