‘You must listen to this,’ said Hugo, and Valerie, out of simple love, stopped writing and listened, though Lover at the Gate was in mid-flow and she did not want her concentration spoiled: what she now put on the page was beginning to have the quality of automatic writing: she feared the cutting-in of her own rationality: doubt would come with it, and hesitation.
Q: But this Darcy’s Utopia of yours, this paradise, is surely merely a dream. The product of wishful and naϊve thinking – nothing but a cruel deceit: a phantasmagoria.
A: I promise you this: Darcy’s Utopia is no dream. It is here; it is all around: it is ours for the asking, the taking: it is the picking of the apple on the tree. A ripe apple: just a touch and it falls into the hand, round, perfect, fitting just right. We live in a world of unimaginable plenty, unbelievable surplus. More than enough food for our millions and millions: high technology serves us. We have become so clever: it has become so easy. Houses to shelter us a-plenty: we know how to build them. Clothes to cover us: so many old clothes in the world! Brenda is on income support, yet you should see how the washing basket overflows! The trouble lies in distribution: not in production. Machines serve us: technology serves us; our habits oppress us, and enslave us. One man has a house with twelve rooms: another lives in a cardboard box. The man with twelve rooms is a decent guy. What stops him sharing? He’ll put a coin or a note in a charity box: he uses money to salve his conscience: the very money that causes in its plenty the rich man’s grief, in its absence the poor man’s woe: it is the symbol of our failure, not our success. ‘Let them spend more on health!’ we cry. ‘On schools! On happiness!’ Spend what? Coins, notes? ‘Money’ has stopped working. Pour millions upon millions into a nation’s health service, it makes no difference: still the people hack and cough and go untended, die for lack of attention, because money no longer represents what it did – labour, skill, concern, capital, organization, involvement. It has become a commodity itself, to be bought and sold by people skilled only in doing just that, and they have taken the guts out of money, weeded it out.
Do you have a mortgage on your house? Have you built up a debt to the bank? If those paper debts were wiped out in the computer that prints your monthly statement, would it make any difference in real terms to anyone else? Would there be less wealth in the world? No! Would it affect the communal resource of food, services, capital? Of course not. Those debts relate to the past, not now. Their wiping out would merely free the individual from anxiety, heal his ulcer, lighten his step, brighten his eye. Money has become a thing of no value: usury, once a sin, is now the faith of nations. Buy on your credit card: buy, buy, buy! What have you got? Nothing that makes you happier than a child’s Christmas toy, bought in the land of plenty, broken and forgotten by Christmas night, discarded, swept up, thrown away; some unbiodegradable bit of plastic, moulded into partial or sentimental shape. Transitory, a panacea to stop the wail of the poor muddled infant: one that didn’t even work for long. What’s it all about? Money! The human race has had enough of it. As a medium of exchange it no longer works, and that’s that. We have to face it. Work hard, grow rich? You’re joking. Work hard, stay poor; that is the message of money. The brightest are wasted: the cunning triumph: the robber barons are back. Who saves, these days? No one. Who believes that by working now we can store up security for the future? We can’t. We know in our hearts money is worthless but how can we escape its tyranny: how begin afresh to judge ourselves and one another?
Q: You have an answer?
A: Wait, wait! For a few to have money in abundance and others too little is the root of all social ills: it is the differential which results in unrest, riot, war, discrimination, class systems, crime, snobbery: the belief that one man is of more intrinsic value than another for reasons other than his temperament, his moral qualities, and his likeability. The only real, the only true wealth lies in friends in abundance, company in plenty, comfort in abandon, love overflowing: what have these things to do with money? – except that we cheat and lie and use money to acquire them; knowing no other way to do it. The man who gives a boat party knows in his heart that his friends like his yacht more than they like him: he is lonely and restless in their company. He picks up his mobile phone, dials his stockbroker in Tokyo. ‘More money, more money!’ he demands, and clever minds set to work at his behest, the computers shift and change a little all over the world, and presently his bank balance shows another nought; and, so that that nought should be there, somewhere in the undeveloped world another ten backs break needlessly.
Lack of money causes misery, anxiety, early death: the cramping of personality, the limiting of human potential. Lack of money prevents us eating properly when we are children, ruins our health, rots our teeth, makes our parents quarrel and take to drink, stops us having the clothes we want, the friends we like, the parties we long for, stops us having the tuition which would enable us to get an education – makes us end up street sweepers and not doctors; induces women to have babies because there is no money for travel or entertainment, or to leave the parental home any other way: lack of money humiliates us all our lives: lack of money makes us live with husbands or wives we no longer love: lack of money makes us age earlier than we need: makes our hands rough with toil and our brows creased with anxiety: keeps us weeping by day and sleepless by night: the terror in our lives is the bill through the door which can’t be paid: our lives close in the knowledge of failure – we failed to make enough money. We never did what we wanted with our lives. How could we? We didn’t have the money.
We tell ourselves ‘money isn’t important’, but it is, it is. We couldn’t afford this, we couldn’t afford that: and our lives and our friendships and our marriages and our children were thereby curtailed, limited.
And we put up with it. We put up with it because we need the differential: we like to feel superior to our neighbours, and if the penalty is that the man up the road feels superior to us, we’ll put up with it. We like to have kings to worship and admire: we love a bit of gold leaf to ooh and ah at: we don’t mind being poor just so long as there’s someone poorer than us. Snobbish to our bootstraps. We still believe money equates with worth. That the rich are rich by virtue of being intelligent, bright, strong and powerful. And once at the beginning, when the first few coins were exchanged, the first kings decided to mint the stuff, I daresay that was true. Times change, times change; yet habits hold. Money was handed down from father to son; it lost its merit as a token of worth; the idle and nasty could be a great deal more rich than the hardworking and good. Money and intelligence pretty soon had little connection. Money and privilege, every unnatural link. The rich no longer deserve to be rich, or the poor to be poor: there is no merit in having enough money: there is little pleasure in having too little money. Sex is the source of all pleasure, money is the source of all pain.
Q: You mean lack of money?
A: I do not. It is this assumption that so hampers our thinking. Because lack of money is bad, we assume money itself is good. It is another example of the Trap of the False Polarity. You might in good time like to write a pop-psychology book under that title? Or perhaps not. We’ll see.
‘I most sincerely hope you don’t,’ said Valerie. ‘You are a serious person.’ Hugo stroked the back of her neck with his strong fingers, and she quietened and went on listening.
Q: Perhaps you are not talking about the pursuit of money, but the pursuit of power? Most people equate money with power, power with money.
A: What is power? The desire to make other people do what you want? The power of the parent over the child? The tyrant over his subject? The employer over the employed? Take away money and you deprive the unjust of power. The child can have his football boots because the words ‘we can’t afford it’ will be linked to the long-gone and not-lamented past: the tyrant cannot control against the will of the subject because he cannot frighten his people with notions of helplessness and poverty: the employer will have to charm and wheedle his workers if he wants them to work for him: he will have to sing and dance to entertain them: enthuse them with pleasure for their daily toil: they will be paid with the world’s respect, and all around them there will be abundance. We will not be wage slaves any more. We will not need our wages. We may accept them, to oblige: to save another’s face. But that’s all. In Darcy’s Utopia there will be no wages, there will be no money.
Q: Oh come now! Easier said than done.
A: Not at all; it could be done even here – merely increase the supply of money until it becomes something of little value, as plentiful as grass: let it grow on every street corner, pour from the high street banks: see how little by little it is of less and less value: soon it is only stuff fit to engage the attention of those who love to indulge in the act of recycling: we will probably find that, pulped, bank notes are an excellent media for growing acorns into oaks. My husband Julian and I went on our honeymoon to Yugoslavia – annual inflation ran at 350 per cent. A hyper-inflationary economy. Yet people ate, drank, sang, laughed, rejoiced, loved and were happy. Talked — how they talked! The streets were noisy with greetings, chatter and friendship. It was there my husband and I began to develop our theories, Darcian Monetarism as it came to be called: that the answer to our current economic ills is not to control inflation but to encourage it until we cease to be a money economy altogether.
Q: Perhaps, being on honeymoon, you wore rose-tinted spectacles?
A: It is true we had a perfectly wonderful time. As I say, sex is the source of all pleasure, money is the source of all pain.
At this point the tape clicked to a stop. Neither Hugo nor Valerie attended to it. It had been running on unheard for some time, in any case.