Money

But the American pursues money for the sake of one of the crazies, vaguest, fantasticalest ideas that have ever entered a rational brain. He pursues it for the sake of what might be called 'power-in-the-abstract', an idealistic, subjective, cerebral thing; a dream in fact without substance, without habitation, an 'airy nothing', a floating will-o'-the-wisp!
That is why Americans who are making money leave their landscape, their houses, their streets, their gardens, their very automobiles, so littered, untidy and ramshackle. They are pursuing something that is a fantastic ideal...
What money represents to them is something thinner than a ghost, less ponderable than a cloud. It is not even power in the European sense of that word that they are after — not power, that is to say, over people, over things, over the destinies of nations. It is, as it were, the Platonic idea of power — power for its own sake, or if you will, the diffused potentiality of power; the sense of being in a position to experience all human experience; to give every form of privilege, every form of knowledge, every form of adventure, what they would call the 'once over'.

(John Cowper Powys,'The American Scene and Character', 1927, in Elusive America)