27 Depose the Tyrant Wealth

Tolle querelas

Pauper enim non est cui rerum suppetit usus

              Horace, 65–8 BC

Then cease complaining, friend, and learn to live.

He is not poor to whom kind fortune grants,

Even with a frugal hand, what Nature wants.

Sometimes I think that what we need is not more wealth but more poverty. It is wealth that causes the problems, wealth that causes the inequalities.

Satish Kumar

I have nothing – nothing! – and I love it.

Keith Allen

Superficially, to the freedom-seeker, money is very attractive. It can certainly be pleasant to have money. It appears to promise comfort, ease, plenty, fun, happiness and, above all, it appears to promise freedom. Freedom of movement, freedom from interference by others, freedom from doing work that we don’t want to do. Or, at least, some very large amount of money – exact amount unspecified – appears to offer freedom. What would you do if you had a million pounds? This is the question that’s debated in every school playground. You could give up your job, go on the holiday of a lifetime, buy a Ferrari. You could live like the fantastic lottery yob Michael Carroll, brimming with Asbos, sticking two fingers up at authority and having ‘Crazy Frog’ painted on the bonnet of your Beemer.

And what about ‘fuck-off money’? This vulgar but expressive phrase refers to having so much money, being so very rich, that you don’t have to think about money, and that you can exit the world of Powerpoint presentations, business plans and pitches and all the kowtowing that is generally involved in getting money. Vast wealth, in theory, means you are free from enslaving yourself to another, as you have enough money to do as you please; you do not have to tug your forelock in order to get a job or a piece of work from someone else. You can say ‘no’. In other words, the idea is that you make a lot of money in order to escape from money. I daresay this approach can be successful. In fact, I know of one or two people for whom it has worked well. But it’s a risky game. Most money-making schemes fail, and you are always going to be at the mercy of unpredictable market forces. In the UK today, there are something like 8,000 of these mega-rich people, out of a working population of 30 million. That gives you a one in four thousand chance of joining them, odds no gambler would ever go near. With the odds so highly stacked against you, is it really worth the effort?

It doesn’t make much rational sense to propose money-making as a solution for everybody, because it is in the nature of wealth that only a few can be wealthy, since one person’s wealth depends on other people’s lack of it. We cannot all be rich. As Ruskin puts it in Unto This Last: ‘… riches are a power like that of electricity, acting only through inequalities or negations of itself. The force of the guinea you have in your pocket depends wholly on the default of a guinea in your neighbour’s pocket …’ He goes on to say: ‘The art of becoming rich … is the art of establishing the maximum inequality in our own favour.’

We are all supposed to want to become rich. Wanting to be rich is one of the motors of a competitive world. Wanting to be rich is what keeps us striving, working, fighting, struggling, competing, conning and abandoning morals. And wanting to be rich is the precise impulse that is exploited by the people who actually do become rich, the usurers and the investors, the market manipulators, because they exploit our greed for their own ends. Wanting more money removes us from enjoying the present; it is therefore a Puritan trait. We should celebrate what we have. Wanting to be rich is actually the first desire that must be cast off in the pursuit of freedom.

The problem is that, now, unlike during the Middle Ages, no one wants to be poor. It is seen as a sign of failure. As William Godwin puts it: ‘The manners prevailing in many countries are accurately calculated to impress a conviction, that integrity, virtue, understanding and industry are nothing, and that opulence is everything.’ What, in 1793, Godwin called ‘manners’, i.e. the means by which a dominant ideology is spread among the people, today, we would call ‘the media’. There is another way of looking at this, and it’s called ‘counting your blessings’. Real riches are a question of mental attitude. As Robert Burton writes:

One of the greatest miseries that can befal a man, in the world’s esteem, is poverty or want … yet if considered aright, it is a great blessing in itself, a happy estate, and yields no cause of discontent, or that men should therefore account themselves vile, hated of God, forsaken, miserable, unfortunate. Christ himself was poor, born in a manger, and had not a house to hide his head in all his life, ‘lest any man should make poverty a judgement of God, or an odious estate.’ And as he was himself, so he informed his Apostles and Disciples, they were all poor, Prophets poor, Apostles poor … ‘As sorrowing (saith Paul) and yet always rejoicing; as having nothing, and yet possessing all things.’

There are rich and there are poor; there are good rich, good poor and bad rich and bad poor. One or the other should carry no moral judgement with it. It is completely immaterial to freedom. The key phrase in the passage above is ‘if considered aright’. To be poor is only a disgrace if you decide that it is a disgrace, if we as a society agree to see it as a disgrace. There are no absolutes in this. There is a readily available moral approach that says it is good to be poor, and we are equally free to choose that attitude.

In any case, being rich comes with many burdens. There are the bickering relatives and dependants, the sharks who gather around you with their generous offers to relieve you of your cash, the clubs for rich people, the private healthcare, the pension plans and investment programmes. Certainly, when I look back on periods in my life when I have had money, the way I wasted it makes me feel quite queasy.

For the Puritans, worldly success was a sign of religious success. If you were rich, it meant that God favoured you. However, you were not to enjoy your money; better to save it, keep hold of it. Here is Max Weber’s description of the Puritan attitude to wealth:

Wealth is thus bad only in so far as it is a temptation to idleness and sinful enjoyment of life, and its acquisition is bad only when it is with the purpose of later living merrily and without care. But as a performance of duty in a calling it is not only morally permissible, but actually enjoined. The parable of the servant who was rejected because he did not increase the talent which was entrusted to him seemed to say so directly. To wish to be poor was, it was often argued, the same as wishing to be unhealthy; it is objectionable as a glorification of works and derogatory to the glory of God. Especially begging, on the part of one able to work, is not only the sin of slothfulness, but a violation of the duty of brotherly love according to the Apostle’s own word.

I would precisely reverse the Puritan attitude, stated at the start of this passage, and assert that wealth is only good when it leads to ‘living merrily and without care’. Picasso famously said, ‘I want to live like a poor man with lots of money’ – by which he meant, he would spend it generously, freely, joyfully. A beggars’ banquet. This is living free with wealth, whereas, for the Puritans, wealth and possessions were another burden.

The evil Methodist leader John Wesley said: ‘We must exhort all Christians to gain all they can, and to save all they can; that is, in effect, to grow rich.’ Today, we see the same attitude to money among the Christian right in America: riches means God loves you, quite the opposite attitude to riches to the one that Jesus proposed. What I object to in all this is the restless effort and the meanness rather than the wealth itself. If your money comes as a side-effect of doing what you want to do, then it would be perhaps foolish to send it back, however convinced one might be of the holy advantages of poverty. But to seek it for its own sake – although, God knows, having it might ease some burdens – seems dangerous, if it is freedom you really seek. For Burton, wanting more cash was itself enslaving, and he wrote of merchants:

… they are all fools, dizzards, mad-men, miserable wretches, living beside themselves, sine arte fruendi, in perpetual slavery, fear, suspicion, sorrow, and discontent, plus aloes quam mellis habent; and are indeed, ‘rather possessed by their money, than possessors’, as Cyprian hath it, mancipati pecuniis.

Instead of trying to be rich, we might try to be poor, simply by embracing thrift and rejecting consumer gewgaws. Not needing money by reducing our needs can have the same liberating effect as not needing money by making a lot of it. Learning to live within limited means gives a great sense of security, because you become free of wanting more and therefore free of struggle. Also, the less money you need, the less you have to work. This way of escaping money has the great advantage over the high-earning route in that it is very much easier to achieve. But, with being poor, there is no risk attached and most of us would probably find it a fairly simple process to work less and earn less.

I now earn less than half the amount I earned four years ago but, having learned to live within this sum, I am free to pursue my own work. For sure, there are hardships involved. But we manage. Our relative poverty was originally involuntary, but we have learned to accept it and indeed to embrace it and enjoy it. Living with fewer needs, living humbly, frees up an enormous amount of time for reflection and pleasure. That itself is a lucky state to be in. If I can continue to live without having a job, then I shall count myself extremely lucky.

To be free from poverty, then, we need paradoxically to embrace poverty. If we were all poor, then we would all be rich. The answer is to be creative with what you have rather than to resign yourself to the slavish state of constantly wanting more.

Eric Gill embraced this kind of self-sufficient poverty, which he called ‘positive poverty’. In his autobiography, Gill remembers his impoverished father cutting a sausage into eleven slices so each child could have a piece. We need to admire this sort of thing rather than pitying it. Says Godwin: ‘If admiration were not generally deemed the exclusive property of the rich, and contempt the constant lackey of poverty, the love of gain would cease to be an universal passion.’ This was actually the case in the medieval world, with its constant condemnation of capitalism (usury) and industrialism (slavery). It was not that riches did not exist; of course they did. Some merchants became extremely wealthy; the famous example of Dick Whittington is but one. It is more that the love of gain had not become a ‘universal passion’.

We need to recast voluntary poverty as a desirable end. Today, I admire Idler contributors Chris Yates, Mark Manning, Jock Scot and Keith Allen, all of whom have more or less voluntarily embraced Lady Poverty, as St Francis of Assisi called it. I say ‘voluntarily’, because all of them could easily have made a lot of money had they been so inclined, because they are all very talented. But living every day, art and poetry and life, are more important to them than money. These are the people we should venerate, as Godwin suggests. Make poverty cool! (I hope it is obvious, by the way, that I am not promoting famine.)

Freedom from hassle and the cares of cash must surely have been one of the motives of the K Foundation, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, when, in 1997, they withdrew a million pounds from their bank account, money that they had earned from the sales of various hit records, took it to a remote bothy in the Scottish Highlands and burned the lot. It was a spectacular act and in the tradition, I would say, of Jesus and the money-lenders, and also Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, who went into Wall Street and set light to five dollar bills, much to the disgust of the brokers. But the K Foundation’s act was braver, in a sense, than either. They burned a million quid! Their act is also reminiscent of Savonarola’s Bonfire of the Vanities. But where Savonarola’s bonfire was a pious attack on pleasure, the K Foundation’s fire was a freedom-embracing attack on the belief in money.

One of the nice things about growing vegetables is that you escape from the world of money. You also tend to have a surplus, so you can give stuff away. There are all sorts of ways of escaping from the manacles of money. Freecycle is one, a new system whereby people give each other stuff that they don’t need any more. The LETS system is another, where work is carried out on an exchange system. The Permaculture movement is all about creating freedom and self-reliance within your means rather than vainly hoping one day that you will win the lottery. Do it now. Give things away for free and money will lose its power over you.

The answer with money is simply to deprioritize its importance in your life and instead start to create a whole life for yourself. This might mean trying many different projects all at once, some of which earn money and some of which don’t, some which will and some which won’t. I personally pursue a range of activities, all of which are work and all of which are life. Some – books and journalism – make money, and others – the Idler magazine, the village-hall committee, playing with children – do not. Others – vegetable growing, bread-baking – do not make money, but they do produce useful stuff. They save money. Others – ukulele-playing, carpentry – are done for their own sake, and the rest – washing-up, cleaning, cooking, driving – are just as essential. And a very easy and enjoyable way to reduce your dependence on money is simply to embrace thrift, the subject of our next chapter.

WANT LESS