A world ruled by the god of wealth

Plutus (Πλοῦτος) was the Greek god who personified "wealth." Born of Demeter (goddess of the earth) and Iasion, he was charged with distributing abundance to humankind. According to Hesiod's Theogony, Plutus was not originally blind but "gave wealth only to the just." Fearing this, Zeus blinded him, and ever after wealth was distributed at random, without regard to good or wicked. In Aristophanes' comedy Plutus (388 BC), an old man cures the eyes of Plutus, and the story unfolds in which only the just grow rich and the wicked fall into poverty — until at last even the gods, dismayed, ask to set things back as they were. In English of the 1650s, plutocracy emerged as "Plutus (wealth) + kratia (rule)" — "a political system ruled by wealth." Plutonium and plutocrat share the same root. (Note: Pluto, god of the underworld, also derives from the same source, since the depths of the earth were the very source of minerals and treasure.)

Baegeumjuui (拜金主義), "the doctrine of worshipping gold," means the attitude that takes money as the supreme value. The single character "金" denotes not merely the metal but "wealth, money" in general. The term arose in late-19th-century Meiji Japan as a Chinese-character rendering of Western mammonism (Mammon being the god of wealth named in the Bible). The East Asian tradition too had many precedents for wariness of money. Sima Qian's Shiji, in the Biographies of the Money-Makers, observed that "all under heaven come bustling for profit, all under heaven go scrambling for gain (天下熙熙 皆爲利來, 天下攘攘 皆爲利往)." But this was description, not praise. When King Hui of Liang asked Mencius, "How may my state be made to profit?", Mencius replied, "Why must the king speak of profit? There is only benevolence and righteousness (王何必曰利 亦有仁義而已矣)" — for if profit becomes the operating principle of a state, the state will fall. Baegeumjuui is the modern condensation of this classical caution.