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