5. YOU MEAN THAT’S WHAT MONEY REALLY IS?

“The very bright people,” says one of my Wall Street philosopher friends, “know how to worm their way around the Street, and they do very well. And the ones who just buy the stock and put it away probably do all right. But the investors who really follow the market, the ones who call up all the time, ninety percent of them really don’t care whether they make money or not.”

We will come back to what these eager investors do care about, but first, this business about all the investors not wanting to make money; it may just be the healthiest thing we have heard in a long time, if we can believe what money really is, at least unconsciously. If the sixteen thousand security analysts, the fifty thousand brokers, and all these programs in the IBM 360s are busy looking for the right set of rational numbers, perhaps we can sneak around the flank for a look at what money may mean to you. If we knew that, we might be able to step outside ourselves, as Mister Johnson said, and look back, and if we know something about ourselves and money, at least we can be conscious of the instincts toward it which influence our actions.

The reading list on mass psychology and markets may be brief, but the list on men and money is endless. Norman Brown, whose Life Against Death is one of the most brilliant critiques extant, has to run through Alfred North Whitehead, Émile Durkheim, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marcel Mauss, Freud, Marx, M. J. Herskovits, Laum, Ruskin, and Nietzsche just to get warmed up. All of these learned scholars think money is more than just that green stuff in your wallet. Money has a mystical quality; the markets of antiquity were sacred places, the first banks were temples, and the money-issuers were priests and priest-kings. Gold and silver held a stable relationship through antiquity, based, says one authority, on the astrological ratio of the cycles of their divine counterparts, the sun and moon. (This is in a book called Wirtschaftsgeschichte des Altertums, if you want to look it up. I don’t. I am reporting this at second hand, and anyway we have busted the old sun-moon business by pegging gold and letting silver go through the roof. There are those that think gold is due to go up—whether or not because of the influence of the sun—but that is another story.)

The point all these learned scholars make is that money is useless; that is, it must literally be useless in order to be money, whether money is the stone cartwheels of Yap island, shells, dogs’ teeth, gold stored in Fort Knox, or East African cattle which can’t be eaten because that would be—literally—eating up capital. The thread of thought here goes directly against that of Adam Smith the First, who postulated that money was useful and men rational. The invisible hand of the market brought the cobbler’s boots to market in exchange for the farmer’s cabbages so that, efficiently, the cobbler did not have to farm nor the farmer to cobble. Adam Smith the First’s economic man was a rational man, and much of economics assumes that men will always go in the direction of the maximization of profit or of production. But since we are skittering over the idea that men are not always rational, we have to see where the idea that money is useless, or why it is useless, will lead us.

At the root of the impulse to pile up this useless money is “the compulsion to work.” (Norman Brown here.)

This compulsion to work subordinates man to things.… it reduces the drives of the human being to greed and competition (aggression and possessiveness) … the desire for money takes the place of all genuinely human needs. Thus the apparent accumulation of wealth is really the impoverishment of human nature, and its appropriate morality is the renunciation of human nature and desires—asceticism. The effect is to substitute an abstraction, Homo economicus, for the concrete totality of human nature, and thus to dehumanize human nature.

Wealth is useless stuff that can be condensed and stored. Sandor Ferenczi, a member of Freud’s Wednesday Evening Psychological Association, went about as far as you can go in an essay called “On the Ontogenesis of the Interest in Money,” in which he equates money with body wastes—“nothing other than odorless dehydrated filth that has been made to shine”—presumably gold, in this case. (Before hooting, remember that we are groping for something on the nonrational level. Aristotle said money-making was an unnatural perversion.) Money has always had overtones of the mystical; for Luther this becomes secular, and therefore demonic—Satan’s work.

Why pile up this useless stuff? The surplus labor that produces surplus wealth is from the dammed-up or mischanneled libido (Freud again). Norman Brown goes Freud one further: “The whole money complex is rooted in the psychology of guilt,” and gold is the absolute symbol of sublimation. Money is “condensed wealth; condensed wealth is condensed guilt. But guilt is essentially unclean.” Thus Christmas gift-giving is a partial expiation for piling up all that condensed guilt during the year. Guilt here is not for anything in particular; it is part of the personality structure. Back to Freud: “One must … never allow oneself to be misled into applying to the repressed creations of the mind the standard of reality; this might result in underestimating the importance of fantasies in symptom-formation on the ground that they are not actualities … one is bound to employ the currency that prevails in the country one is exploring; in our case it is the neurotic currency.” To which Norman Brown adds, “all currency is neurotic currency.”

Now it may seem a far cry from the kind of money being cited here to the total wealth of all those liquid pieces of paper, say some $700 billion in common stocks and $600 billion or so in bonds. That money, clearly, is not useless, it is out there building new plants and paying payrolls and producing widgets and so on. But Norman Brown, trying to work interest (i.e., return on capital) into his scheme, even covers this: “Things become the god (the father of himself) that he [man] would like to be; money breeds … thus money in the civilized economy comes to have a psychic value it never had in the archaic economy.” And this is a true infantile wish: to become a father to oneself. All of this leads Norman Brown on into a discussion of the city as related to all that piled-up wealth, and the city as an attempt at immortality, an attempt to beat death. (The inability to accept death is the woof of Brown’s fabric.)

All this may seem like peculiar stuff, especially taken cold, but I find it provocative. I have been a bit terse with it, and perhaps have not done it justice. Perhaps our whole Game is outside the realm of money as condensed, useless, and guilt, for if it is a Game, then it is “sport, frolic, fun and play,” and presumably on the Life side, not the Death side. (Norman Brown does make me feel sometimes that the only way to spend an afternoon is drinking beer and fishing, so as to escape the accusation of compulsive, guilt-ridden work, but I have the sneaky feeling that while I am fishing he is working on another book.) It is true that you have to work long enough to acquire a surplus enough to buy some chips for the Game, but the money you make playing the Game isn’t work, it’s play—or are you making it seem like work?

What seems to me missing from Norman Brown is not only the idea of the Game but any concept of the paperness of our paper markets, what we all learned in basic economics as the multiplier. Grant all that compulsive work to make the compulsive money on a one-for-one basis, we slave one hour, we get one white chip for the Game. But three of us form a little company, create stock (paper), earn $50,000, and our public liquid market will give us not $50,000 but a million if we can convince it that the piece of paper is worth twenty times earnings. That is really effortless wealth, and we live in one of the only countries where this can be done.

Come to think of it, the Federal Reserve Board creates money all the time. It just waves its wand of bill purchases and sales, and presto, there is money where there was none before. This is called regulating the money supply, but it works exactly the same as printing bright new greenbacks, and the Fed doesn’t even have to take the money from somewhere else in order to put that money into the banking system. On the other hand, maybe the members of the Federal Reserve Board feel guilty as hell.

So, in a logical sense, perhaps all these investors who come to the marketplace not to make money are free from the guilt and anxieties of money-making, and that’s why they set out not to make money. No? I don’t believe it either. If they were really free, they wouldn’t have even shown up for the Game. Something else must be bugging them.

I suppose there does have to be a balance in time, so that we do not have, as Keynes said, quoting Alice, “a case of jam tomorrow and never jam today,” or in Norman Brown’s words, “the dynamics of capitalism is postponement of enjoyment to the constantly postponed future.” And it is true that many of our most adept Game players never get around to spending the money they have made. But if they had escaped the guilt and tension necessary for the first white chip, they would never have had all the fun of the Game.