I personally suspect that the belief that money is real is problematic, psychologically.

There are all sorts of experiments that show we treat money in our minds differently from most other things.

A famous example is that many people would think nothing of taking a ten cent pen from work, but would be abhorred at the idea of taking money, even ten cents, from petty cash and just keeping it.

An experiment has shown that, if you give people the chance to cheat for money, or to cheat for tokens that can be immediately exchanged for money after the experiment, they will cheat more for tokens, despite the fact that at that point, the tokens are technically a type of money.

So, this sort of thing makes me suspect that beliefs about money also influence our ethics and our mental proclivities. So maybe people who believe money is more real are more likely to hoard it or to have gambling problems.

I think the underlying realization for The Devil Went Down to Georgia is more that Americans will listen to good music even if they don’t agree with the lyrics.

The same goes for Imagine by John Lennon, for example.