Money and Make-Believe Part II

Okay, let me try to explain this more clearly--or to the best of my understanding anyway.

Let’s say that due to a nuclear accident there are only three people left in the world: persons A, B, and C. And let’s say that all three of these people are dedicated Republicans who believe strongly in the American way and wish to recreate the American system of government, beginning with the US financial system. If that were the case, one of those people, let’s say person A, would be designated the money maker (in the real world that role is divided between the Federal Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and commercial and state banks, only the first of which is a purely Federal institution) and the other two would be designated the money receivers, or, in the American system, the money borrowers.

Person A then decides to create one hundred dollars by telling person B that he now has one hundred dollars (today we make this transaction by typing that amount into a computer; rather than saying you have one hundred dollars, someone types it). But that one hundred dollars is not given freely or as compensation for labor. It’s created from nothing and given only as credit, which means that the money has to be paid back with interest.

Person B now takes that one hundred dollars and decides to make a purchase from person C. Person C is obligated under the rules of the system to accept person B’s imaginary one hundred dollars as payment. In other words, he agrees that person B’s imaginary one hundred dollars is real money and has real value. Consequently, person B becomes the proud owner of a slightly used but very warm winter coat, and person C is one hundred dollars richer.

But, because person B still has to pay the one hundred dollars back to person A, he will have to earn back his one hundred dollars by either selling merchandise to or by going to work for person C. Remember, there is only one hundred dollars in the system at this time, so person B is likely to turn to person C, the owner of all the money in existence, for help in repaying his debt. Person C understands this fact and agrees to pay person B five dollars a day in exchange for B’s cooking services. At this rate, the principal on the loan could be paid off in twenty months. However, since person A lent the one hundred dollars at a five percent monthly interest rate, B’s one hundred dollar debt will have doubled by the time he earns his initial one hundred dollars back. The problem, though, is that there isn’t an extra one hundred dollars in existence. Person A only created one hundred dollars, not two hundred; he created the principal but not the interest person B is expected to repay (and it should be pointed out that if person C deposits his money with person A, there will be an extra ninety dollars available for borrowing).

This means that Person B will have two options. One, he can borrow more money from person A and use the money he receives and was created from his second loan to pay back the first loan, and then later use the money from a third loan to pay back the second, and then later take out a fourth loan to pay back the third … and on and on indefinitely. Or, a more appealing option, he can convince person C to take out a loan also. If person C takes out a loan of one hundred dollars, then person B can sell his secret cooking recipes to person C for the same one hundred dollar amount and pay off his loan in full. Then person B is debt free. But person C is now in the same position that person B was before paying his debt. So person C, eventually, is left with the same two options that B had. Someone within this system has to remain in debt; someone has to be losing in order for the other to get ahead or to just stay even. Equal prosperity is impossible.

Inevitably, someone will ALWAYS be indebted to person A who has now made close to three hundred dollars simply by twice speaking the same sentence: “you have a hundred dollars".

How well do you think A, B, and C would get along being governed by this system? What would the quality of their relationships be like? Pretty shitty, I imagine.

To be fair, though, I’m not an expert in this field, and I’m sure my analogy oversimplifies a few things. I know, for example, that in the actual world, person A wouldn’t be an actual, complete person (and wouldn’t thereby be accruing wealth, just money) nor would he be the only designated wealth-maker (central banks don’t have a monopoly on wealth, just money-making) and A would also have to pay interest (in extremely small sums) to hold on to the assets of persons B and C etc.—but, for the most part, I believe, if the information in the movie is correct, my analogy creates a reasonably accurate picture of the current system. And if that’s the case, I doubt it would take long for B and C to realize that the system wasn’t working out too well. And I doubt A, B, and C would become super good friends while the system was in place. Talk of revolution wouldn’t be described as Utopian fantasy, but talk of maintaining and accepting or even merely tweaking rather than overthrowing the system, by anyone other than person A, would likely be described as pathologically passive and delusional—the type of talk that you hear from an abused wife when she’s rationalizing her husband’s abuse for the upteenth time. Moreover, person A would have a tough time convincing B and C that their inevitably cut-throat and manipulative behavior towards one another isn’t a required behavior pattern of the system. He couldn’t say, well, it’s not the system that causes you to exploit each other the way you do; it’s your animal nature. YOU’RE the problem. I doubt B and C would believe him.

Well, on second thought, they probably would.


*****


We are completely dependent on the commercial banks. Someone has to borrow every dollar in circulation. When one gets a complete grasp of the picture; the tragic absurdity of our hopeless position is almost incredible, but there it is.
Robert Hemprill
Credit Manager Federal Reserve Bank

Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.
Kenneth Boulding
Economist

Money is a new form of slavery and distinguished from the old simply by the fact that it is impersonal; there is no human relationship between master and slave.
Leo Tolstoi

Money and Make-Believe

While standing in line at the grocery store yesterday, I overheard the following conversation between a mother and her daughter:

“Mom, can I have some gum?”

“Do you have any money?”

“Yeah.”

“Not pretend money. They don’t take pretend money here.”

“I have real money.”

“Show it to me then.”

“It’s orange.”

“Let me see. No, you need real money here. They don’t take pretend money.”

“Mom?”

“Yeah?”

“Can I have some gum?”

It’s sad but true. The store doesn’t accept imaginary orange money, not even from adorably cute little girls. But the mother wasn’t entirely correct in telling her daughter that the store didn’t accept pretend money. The store does accept certain kinds of pretend money, so long as it comes from the right people. It accepts my debit card, for example, which, since it withdraws money from my bank account, is only slightly less substantive than the empty hand the little girl showed to her mother. That doesn’t help me any. Whatever money I spend with my debit card represents real wages that I’ve earned with my labor. But when I deposit my earnings into a bank account, most of my money, about ninety percent of it, even though I use the full amount to make purchases, will disappear. The only reason I’m able to make purchases with my money is because its value is secured through other people’s debts, debts that generate profits for the banks. And if everyone in America paid off his or her debts, I wouldn’t have any money. NO ONE would have any money! Here are a couple videos to explain it all in more detail:


Moneyasdebt


moneymasters


I haven’t watched the second one yet (it’s REALLY long), so I can’t really vouch for it. Let me know if it isn't worth my plug.

Nurturing the Inner Anarchist

Last week, while visiting Utah over the holidays, I met with three other members of the blogger community for what my Brother-in-Law has termed the first annual Exmo Expo. There were a few threads of discussion (we talked for over five hours!), but only two that I want to give more time to here: the issue of whether Christopher McCandless (the young man who inspired the book and movie Into the Wild) was being inconsiderate to his parents and the issue about whether “anarchism” is a realizable goal.

In an essay on Shakespeare’s most famous play, the poet TS Eliot makes the claim that the only way of expressing emotion in art is by “finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.” He goes on, using the objective correlative as a fundamental criterion for successful artistic expression, to condemn Hamlet as a failed play, a play in which Hamlet’s emotions are “in excess of the facts” and the dramatist’s emotions unconverted by his artistry.

To his credit, Eliot later denounced the objective correlative as being too rigid and dogmatic, conceding that “it does not necessarily exhaust all the emotional overtones, which are conveyed, as far as they can be, by the incantation of the verse”. But he didn’t denounce the concept entirely, insisting that it “must satisfy the reader or theatrical onlooker that it is the equivalent of the author's feelings, and thus as far as necessary communicates and renders intelligible these feelings”.

To a certain extent, as I’ll explain shortly, I agree with Eliot’s insights, but I strongly take issue with his final judgment. Hamlet is a great play, and it’s precisely because Hamlet lacks an objective correlative for his emotions that the play works. It’s the failure of the play—the failure to force experience into language and a familiar story—that makes Hamlet the indisputable success that it is, both in terms of its impact and its longevity.

Eliot is right on one account, though. The play is, ultimately, a dramatization of failure—a failure, in this case, to create a set of facts capable of reproducing the intensity of the artist’s inner experience. For that reason, Hamlet is not a play for everyone. It’s not a play for the vast numbers of people who have deadened the intensity of their emotions by trimming them down to fit the circumstances of the world that they live in—for those who, because their careers and their domestic lives insist on it, have put their feelings to sleep. For that audience, art has to be jarring and unpleasant. It has to awaken.

But Hamlet is not for that audience. Hamlet was written for those already awake, for those too much awake, for those too much alive, or, to use Hamlet’s words, “too much under the sun”. Hamlet is a play for the other Hamlets of the world, for the person of sensibility, who, as Eliot deftly articulates, has maintained the life within him (and the intensity of feeling normally only felt in adolescence) by his “ability to intensify the world to his emotions”.

Such a person was Christopher McCandless. By fleeing “into the wild”, McCandless was not merely attempting to escape his parents and society’s expectations, he was trying to keep his emotions alive and to intensify the world he lived in to match his inner awareness; he was seeking an objective correlative, an objective correlative that would not limit and tame his inner feeling but would enhance and nurture it. He was trying to avoid domestication. McCandless sought the kind of relationship that he couldn’t have with his parents or with anyone who has “trimmed down her feelings to fit the business world”; he sought a relationship that only an artist can realize and a relationship that can only exist in the raw, in primitive conditions, a relationship “between two solitudes that protect and greet each other”, a relationship between two autonomous and equal entities. For McCandless, as with Hamlet, the thought of reducing his passions to accommodate society’s expectations was unthinkable. For the Hamlets of the world there is only one way to interact with society, and that’s by elevating society, by intensifying the world, even with cruelty, to match their inner passions, passions as yet undiminished by the threats and tyranny of civilization.

For these people there are two choices: suicide or revolt. They cannot cow their emotions to suit those who love them. They cannot be imprisoned, except by bad dreams. Instead, they must create the conditions for cohesion by not merely escaping into the wild but by importing the wild into civilization. They must act to embody their passions. Otherwise, the life within them will be extinguished. Though they direct their actions onto others, it is their own fullness, their own life and freedom, at a minimum, that is being preserved.

For the anarchist who has not forsaken his feelings and authenticity, the question of whether anarchy is a realizable goal becomes secondary; the real question is Hamlet’s question, the question of whether “to be or not to be”, the question of how life itself, in all its freedom and wholeness and reality, can be perpetuated. Whether the anarchist dream can actually be achieved is merely an intellectual question, a question asked by the prisoner in order to tolerate his incarceration. It isn’t a question asked by the animal in an effort to stay alive or the mother instinctively acting to protect her child, and it isn’t a question asked by the anarchist.

But it is a question that every civilized human, even the Hamlets of the world, have to wrestle with at one time or another. While most of us deal with the problem by putting our hopes to sleep, others, the intellectuals, deal with it through exorcism, by finding an objective correlative that will petrify our yearnings rather than nourish and broaden them. In Hamlet, we witness such an effort, the effort, as described by Herman Muller, “to articulate a despair so it can be left behind.” Art provides a means to articulate that despair and to consequently escape it, but, as Hamlet shows, it is an effort doomed to failure—to failure and to isolation and to existential impotence.

The ghosts of our fathers, the ghosts that speak to us from the grave and from the mouths of our parents and our teachers, must be listened to but they don’t have to be obeyed. The past does not have to be exorcised or to determine us. That attempt at determination, that social programming, in fact, must be resisted, just as Hamlet and McCandless resisted it, by insisting on one’s non-meaning and wildness—by refusing to become an objective correlative that can be owned—by maintaining one’s solitude and one’s otherness in the face of a reified world attempting to tame, largely by shaping our desires into fetishes, our natural passions.

Both Hamlet and McCandless succeeded in their resistance (or would have succeeded, I’m presuming, had they lived). They learned that the only way to preserve their solitude and their authenticity was by engaging the other as other—by relating creatively to the life around them rather than imposing their will or being imposed upon. In a sense, both learned to become artists—post-modern or Zen artists, in a way, who attempt to relate to others through experience, through untamed and unlimited experience, rather than through dogma and conceptualization. They learned to engage the world rather than symbolize it. In that respect, Hamlet’s and McCandless’ quest becomes the quest of the artist—the quest to find self-expression through poetry, through “the incantation of the verse” instead of through the manipulation of concepts and language that would define and thereby minimize rather than intensify the experience of the audience. By not identifying a clear objective correlative, by not defining or minimizing Hamlet’s experience in any way, Shakespeare manages to engage the audience without condescension, without determining them or allowing their preconceptions to determine his expression and his actions. By altering traditional expectations of meaning and structure, the audience is allowed to experience the play afresh, without instruction. As a result, the theater experience is intensified in a way that enables the audience to relate to the play, and to the artist and characters who help create the play, in all its terrible beauty and horror--as "the thing that it is that can be no other thing". The viewer is forced then to look life head on, in all its wildness and ineffable mystery, and to choose either to ignore or to exorcise it, but not to control it, not to make of it a possession. In other words, the artist insists on being related to honestly. At times, such an insistence might be seen as cruel (“I must be cruel, only to be kind: Thus bad begins and worse remains behind”--Hamlet Act III scene IV.), and at times, because the stipulation isn’t honored, it can be seen as evasive, but in truth it is neither.

And the struggle to realize anarchy, to strip experience of all that defines and limits it and in that way to create a space wherein honest and equal interaction is possible, is no different than the artist’s struggle to reach an audience. One does not embark on such a struggle out of feasibility but out of self-preservation. And the artist’s public struggle cannot be divorced from the private struggle. One’s private revolt, one’s efforts to preserve a healthy solitude and to avoid domination, becomes realized only through action, through public and conspicuous resistance. In an interdependent world, the self cannot exist except through relationship, which means that one cannot exorcise the problems of the world away or cast them outside of one’s self. The past cannot be left behind, but, by engaging the world as a creator, as one who magnifies possibility instead of coercing it into oblivion, the past can be transformed. And by transforming your conditioned self, the self imposed on you from patriarchical ghosts throughout the centuries, and by simultaneously transforming all your relationships and preserving your authenticity, you are also transforming the world; you are attempting to realize the anarchist both within and beyond you. In that sense, the artistic and the anarchist struggle, the struggle to achieve self-liberation, is also the struggle to achieve communion and a struggle that isn't avoidable, a struggle to love and to be loved without restraint.

****
“I believe that reading, in its original essence, is the fruitful miracle of communication within the midst of solitude. [To read (and, I might add, to honestly relate)] is to receive a communication with another way of thinking, all the while remaining alone, that is, while continuing to enjoy the intellectual power that one has in solitude and that conversation dissipates immediately.”
Proust

http://www.bartleby.com/200/sw9.html