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 naive 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it makes no difference: still the people hack and cough and go untended, die for lack of attention, because money no longer represents what it did—labour, skill, concern, capital, organization, involvement.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