[Opinion] Is Credit Card `Money of Devil`?

"Wherever you go, Pass! OO pass card."

Credit card guarantees `pass` for travelers like this aforesaid advertisement.

It can pass anywhere, in desert, in every world, as it is propagated in TV AD; this is the power of credit card.

There will be numerous exquisite `pass` in World Cup football ground; however, football fans from the world that will come to see it will be travelers who rely on credit card mostly.

Besides for a festival to succeed, good communication is required.

We should communicate with them at first in order to shout with them as one.

Therefore, if world cup is held, it is not only football which goes here and there, people, money and words also moves and are exchanged.

If football gathers up people, peoples` mind and words has instinct to connect each different thought, too.

If English enables global communication, the power of money is above than that.

The more money economy activates, meetings which we couldn`t imagine can be concluded among various people and distant things.

Now let’s pay attention to similarity between money and mind and their parallel relationship.

It is conventional story that the origin of abstract mind is in accordance with the origin of money.

Money originates from the mind that different things shares common character which can be compared with each other.

It is same as the belief that general and same notional character is in specific things.

It seems that money or nation; everything is general equivalent and abstract substance. Karl Marx compared money to mirror once.

It is the money that makes all goods separate from exchange point in order to compare and measure their height.

However, money is not mirror of goods but mirror of comprehensive historical situation.

Money reflects all kind of social order and way of thinking of one generation.

Thereby, if form of money changes, times would and if times change, human beings will be changed.

`Philosophy of money` (1900) by Geork Ziemel pierced this point.

According to the book, group and region fastened medieval people.

Economic behavior characterized personality, as belongings and each owner weren’t divided.

And this unification is broken in the modern society.

Each goes into various differentiations meeting and parting.

However, as Ziemel`s resists that these kind of changes are due to induction of money economy.

Seeing the negative viewpoint, it is fetishism that money reigns on the value of each and every material.

But in case of affirmative viewpoint, it is rationalization of social economy.

The more things are calculated by money, the more social relations go into flexibility and mutual reliability and it presents objectivity.

On other hand, person becomes possessive and free from social relations.

The tendency deepened when credit card showed up.

Therefore, scholar in these days, like Daniel Bell, social scholar in U.S., defines the period of induction of credit card as turning point for divergence of modern times.

Then what is the difference between modern ages and divergent modern ages?

If modern times are the age which consider money as the signs that replace permanent substance like gold, divergent modern ages is the time in which pure credit replaces the position of gold.

Recently, the use of credit card is getting activated.

This is result of government`s judgment and intention in order to secure transparent tax origin and raise up tax basis.

However, no matter how the beginning was, let`s have a mind that the change of exchange and way of settlement of accounts influence wide range beyond the level of politics and economics.

It influences not only public area but also private area and not only the level of consciousness but also unconsciousness.

After all, it decides the world view newly and moral sensitivity of behavior subject.

The reward is big when we refuse these changes.

IMF Economic crisis of 1997 as well as recent Gate tells us about it.

These were the very rewards, summarily the rewards of discordance, when we were trying to settle down in modern economic system clinging to pre-modern sensitivity and planned divergent modern order in the level of modern way of thinking.

It is same in private level too.

If we give credit card at any time since it works anywhere, the gate of hell can be opened.

Credit card can be said, "this is paradise", through only the hands of mature moral subject.

Kim Sang Hwan (Philosophy, Professor in Seoul University)