The Windkey and the Lamplighter

Money is a weird thing in our culture. We talk about it all the
time—"I need to run to the ATM, I’m out of cash" or "I’ll buy dinner
this time—you got it last time". Both those examples, though, and
most of the interactions I see with money involve a level of secrecy
and privacy, and sometimes even embarassment.

Interestingly, this happens both with those who have money and those
who don’t—whenever they feel that the amount of money they have
might be different than their compatriots. I’ve noticed this a lot
when talking about house-buying. I don’t want to tell people "Yeah,
I’m looking at this $ N house" and have them think "Wow, they’re rich".
On the other hand, in my first few years of school I was really
embarassed to have to explain to friends that I couldn’t afford to eat
dinner out with them, so I’d go along and order the cheapest thing on
the menu, even when it wasn’t really enough food, and refuse offers of help.

The pride of the poor (in at least a relative sense) fits into the
self-reliance culture I discussed href="http://evenmere.org/blog/katallen/self-reliance.html">before,
but how does the shame of the (relative) rich fit in? Perhaps the
same way—the "self-made man" was a proud poor man, and now is a
humble rich man who "remembers his roots" and doesn’t have the
attitude problem mythologically associated with the inherited rich.

So, because of these two taboos, we can’t talk about how much less
money we have than others, and we can’t talk about how much more money
we have than others. That leaves us with the narrow region of our own
social class with which to discuss financial matters—a narrow group
indeed, since we don’t have a strongly striated class system, so "my
peers" might be my peers in education or workplace experience, but not
in financial status. This leaves us with nobody to talk to but ourselves…