KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money

by Higgs, JMR

  The question “Is it art?”, then, should more meaningfully be looked as “Is it magic?” And in this respect, Moore was very clear. The answer was ‘yes’. The money burning "was a powerful magical event," he said. "I can't see any other explanation for it. You're dealing with a form of language, a conversation – but you're not sure what the conversation is... you're waiting for a reply."

  The negation of the money, in this context, can be seen as a sacrifice. A sacrifice is a statement of intent. It serves to focus the mind and the more valuable the object sacrificed is, the greater the focus. You are offering up something of worth in the hope of receiving or achieving something different.

  Of all the unsettling questions you can wrestle with, the question of what modern money actually is is a real humdinger. Of course, we know that money is a token of value that can be used as a medium of exchange. That tells us what money does, but not what it is.

  Modern money is no longer a representation of some physical value such as an amount of gold or silver. Some of it has a physical form, such as pieces of paper or small round pieces of metal, but the vast majority does not. Most of the money supply is virtual, existing only as a pattern of bits inside a computer. Our money system is known as 'fiat money,' which means that it is created out of thin air. But if money is created out of nothing, then how can it have value?

  To answer that, it is more useful to look at Alan Moore's definition of magic than to study economic textbooks. Money is a perfect example of something that doesn't exist, but acts like it does. Money has value only because we say it has. This is an agreed illusion shared by people and governments alike, and surrounded by institutions and laws in the same way that theology surrounds a central idea in one of Robert Anton Wilson's self-justifying reality tunnels. It is an extremely practical belief, which is why it endures. Believing in the value of money is necessary for almost all our modern society and culture. Nevertheless, there isn't anything underpinning the value of our money system other than the fact that the other guy believes it too.

  Money is also designed to move. It does not matter to what ends the movement of money is used, for there is no inherent morality to the system. The only important factor is that the money keeps sloshing around, being used and reused. From the point of view of the money system there is only one perversion, which is to permanently remove money from circulation.

  The reason for this goes to the very core of the financial system, and the practice of charging interest. Today, all money is loaned into existence. A central bank will only physically create money, in other words, if some individual or organisation has asked to borrow it. The bank will then loan the money, and charge a small percentage – the interest rate – for its efforts.

  This system is so widely accepted that it sounds perfectly normal. It does, however, raise the question of where the money to pay the interest charge comes from.

  This is best illustrated with an example. Imagine that a new bank opens in a new country, and imagine that it produces a currency that we will call shillings. Now imagine that this bank then attracts ten customers, all of whom wish to borrow ten shillings. The bank charges interest at 10%, so that everyone has to return 11 shillings to the bank. But how can these ten people all return 11 shillings when they not only don't have that amount, but there isn't even enough money in existence? The debtors will have to find a way to get the extra money from each other. Competition, therefore, suddenly becomes necessary. Should one debtor have all his money taken from him by the rest, then nine people will be able to return the 11 shillings to the bank, while the losing debtor will have no option but to borrow more money from the bank. More money is thus created, and the economy grows.

  It was not always like this. For most of history such a system was utterly forbidden. The word 'usury' is now used to mean the charging of excessive interest for loans, but the original use of the word meant making any charge at all for lending money. Writing developed after money, so it is not possible to know how far back into history this taboo goes, or why our Bronze Age ancestors were so set against the idea. We do know, however, that the earliest recorded laws explicitly forbid usury. In the New Testament, when Jesus overturned the tables at the temple, his anger grew from the fact that the moneylenders were engaging in usury. Jesus, it is generally accepted, was a pretty non-violent type of guy, so when you note how all the other sins, cruelties and injustices of the world failed to tip him over into anger you get a glimpse at just how taboo usury was. Others in the ancient world who denounced usury include Plato, Moses, Muhammad, Aristotle and Buddha. When a line-up like that is in agreement, it is perhaps worth thinking twice about our acceptance of it.

  Why was making money from financial loans so unacceptable in the Ancient World? This is open to interpretation, but one possibility is that it appeared to go against the natural order of things. Work created wealth, so wealth accumulating without work was unnatural. It was seen as a form of tyranny, or theft. Usury was a corruption, a financial cancer, and one that could draw economies out of balance and bring them crashing down.

  But if usury, in the original meaning of the word, was so taboo, how did it become acceptable and establish itself as a cornerstone of modern economics? Much of the answer to this question involves the behaviour of different religions. Usury is still forbidden under Islamic law so a complicated system of Islamic banking was developed which does not include interest, but instead has many charges. It doing so it manages to remain true to the letter of the anti-usury law, if perhaps not the spirit. In Judaism, they took the approach that usury was only forbidden between Jews, so charging interest on loans to non-Jews was religiously acceptable. Jews were then able to travel to non-Jewish communities and act as money lenders, a trade that brought them wealth but also a great deal of historical resentment. In Christianity, usury was banned by Papal decree, but when Henry VIII split with Rome and established the Church of England in 1534 he took a different view. Henry made usury religiously accepted, a move which some economists view as key to the Elizabethan Golden Age that followed.

  Technically speaking the charging of interest on loans is still forbidden in the Catholic world, but in practice no-one pays a blind bit of notice to this.

  In The Eye In The Pyramid, the first volume of the Illuminatus! trilogy, the character of Joseph Malick is told the history of the formation of The Justified Ancients of Mummu. The story stretches back to a time when a series of stones called The Seven Tablets of Creation were carved, around 2500BC, at which time the chief deity was called Marduk and "the official religion of Marduk [...] was based on usury. The priests monopolized the land, and extracted tribute for renting it. It was the beginning of what we laughingly call civilisation, which has always rested on rent and interest."

  It is at this point that the JAMs were formed. "When the first anarchist group arose, they called themselves Justified Ancients of Mummu. Like Lao-Tse and the Daoists in China, they wanted to get rid of usury and monopoly and all the other pigshit of civilization." Here, then, is the raison d'être of the JAMs. They are anarchists, representing the forces of chaos in the war against order. That order is civilisation and civilisation is based on usury, or the system of interest on loans. The Justified Ancients of Mummu, then, were formed to destroy usury.

  This is not something that has been widely noted. Should you talk to even the most obsessive KLF fan, one who has gone to the lengths of reading Robert Anton Wilson's 800+ page novel a number of times, they will probably be unaware that the destruction of usury is the reason that The Justified Ancients of Mummu were established. It is stated clearly, as the quotes above show, but the book is such a torrent of information that, unless you are looking for it, a detail like that is unlikely to stick in your mind. Nevertheless the fact remains that the fictitious organisation The Justified Ancients of Mummu, who became a physical group when Drummond and Cauty took on their name and philosophy, exist to bring about the destruction of the usury that is at the heart of our sys
tem of money.

  Interest is not a fundamental quality of economies. It is an idea that has been projected onto the work and wealth of the physical world. The reason our economic system incorporates concepts such as interest and usury is nothing more than historical choice. There have been eras when negative interest economies have been tried instead, for example. In these systems, your money depreciated over time, slowly losing value. This concept is similar to the practicalities of keeping a store of grain stockpiled over winter because, thanks to the action of mice and other pests, the amount of grain you had come spring would be less than you started with. Negative interest currencies have the advantage of encouraging the use of money. Instead of hoarding it, it makes more sense to use it in a productive way, such as repairing buildings or starting businesses. Under this model the currency circulates more readily and freely, and saving is discouraged.

  The reason why a positive-interest currency has been favoured is because it encourages economic growth. Indeed, it demands it, for the system would collapse if there was no growth to pay the interest charges to the bank. Bankers are very keen on economic growth because, without having to do anything else, it automatically translates into more wealth for them. For this reason, a steady-state economy is unacceptable. It may seem reasonable for a tradesman to wish to perform a regular amount of work each year, enough to pay them sufficient money to live on, but our system cannot work like that. The existence of interest charges - usury, by the original definition - requires that economy must continually grow, which means that more work must be undertaken, year in, year out.

  The belief that endless growth is natural, inevitable and possible has become universally accepted. It has done so by building around itself one of Wilson's self-referential reality tunnels to protect it. But there is a problem here, and it's a significant one. Perpetual growth is not possible, regardless of what economists say.

  This issue is often couched in environmental terms, such as the statement that perpetual growth is not possible in a finite world of non-renewable resources. This argument was made strongly as far back as 1972 by The Limits Of Growth, a book produced by the Club of Rome. The Limits Of Growth has been roundly attacked over the years by politicians and economists inside the 'perpetual growth' reality tunnel, usually with arguments about the inexhaustible supply of human ingenuity and so forth.

  In fact, the basic point does not even need the environmental focus. Growth is exponential, so even small rates such as 2% or 3% a year cause doubling in a generation and soon become absurd. The physicist Tom Murphy has calculated that projected rates of energy growth, for example, have the Earth using the same amount of energy as the Sun in about 1400 years, and more than the entire galaxy of 100 billion suns in 2500 years. In human terms, 2500 years isn't that long. We are still reading books that were written 2500 years ago.

  This, of course, is not going to happen.

  For a more fundamental example of why this is, consider a particle being accelerated through space. As we know from Einstein, energy and matter are intimately linked. As the particle gains energy to move faster, its mass increases. This increase in mass means that it requires more energy to keep accelerating, which further increases its mass and further increases the amount of energy needed for it to accelerate, and so on. It is for this reason that the speed of light is fixed and finite. Photons can't accelerate indefinitely.

  Put more simply, the increase in a quantity affects the forces that were causing that increase. This simple law seems to affect everything. This is the main reason why economies can't grow indefinitely, any more than photons can go faster than the speed of light.

  In the late twentieth century, however, an argument like that was heresy. Global economic collapse was unthinkable. The global economy was believed to be solid, healthy and self-repairing. A magical 'invisible hand' protected the markets and ensured that they would forever continue to function. With one eye on the short term and the other on the self-referential reality tunnel that claims perpetual growth is both possible and normal, economists and politicians could see no flaws in their economic model. This was apparent in the somewhat stunned testimony of Alan Greenspan, the former chair of the Federal Reserve, when he appeared before a U.S. House of Representatives committee to be questioned about the great economic collapse of the early 21st century. “I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms,” he said. When the chair of the committee, Henry Waxman, suggested to Greenspan that “you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working?” he replied, “Absolutely, precisely. You know, that's precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”

  The absurdity of perpetual growth, however, was unaffected by our leaders' inability to consider or discuss it. It lurked hidden, somewhere in the depths of the collective unconscious or the unexplored wild spaces of Alan Moore's Ideaspace. Eventually, some unwary explorer would stumble too close, and actualise it.

  Years after the K Foundation had ended, Drummond had a flash of insight. "Most of the people who wrote about what we did, and the TV programme that was made about it, made a mistake," he said. "I was only able to articulate it to myself afterwards with hindsight. They thought we were using our money to make a statement about art, and really what we were doing was using our art to make a statement about money."

  This tallies with comments made by Cauty at the time. "We nail [the money] to a bit of wood so that it can't function as it wants to. It's to do with controlling the money. Money tends to control you if you've got it, it dictates what you have to do with it, you either spend it, give it away, invest it... We just wanted to be in control of it."

  The K Foundation had been set up to dispose of the money that remained from the KLF days. Drummond and Cauty behaved as if this money was tainted in some way, and that it had to be disposed of in a safe, artistically pure way. The aim of the K Foundation, then, was to cleanse it. In doing so, we can surmise, they might recover their souls which they lost in the music industry.

  Cauty and Drummond initially described the K Foundation as an 'art foundation,' which led to their actions being viewed from the perspective of the art world. With hindsight, it is easy to see how they fell into this position. With The KLF over, they knew they still had work to do together but they did not have a framework to define what that work was. It was not music, that was clear, for those days were behind them. But if not music, then what? There is no established tradition of tainted money cleansing and dispersal foundations. 'Art', meanwhile, was a vague enough term with which to hide all sorts of strange behaviour. What else could they call themselves, then, but an art foundation?

  And how else could they do it? They couldn't give it away or spend it, because that's what money wants. It wants to circulate. That's what gives it power. Even if you nail it to a piece of wood, someone will come along sooner or later to steal it and set it free. Physically destroying it is the only way to stop it. Before it can be stopped there first needs to be the idea that it can be stopped, and that it is not invincible. Up until then, this was largely unthinkable.

  The burning of the million quid should not be seen from the perspective of art. It was never about art. It was much more than that, and much more obvious. It was about the destruction of money.

  It was about the idea that money could be defeated.

  14: UNTHINKABLE

  Discordians have something of an obsession with the number twenty three.

  Robert Anton Wilson first heard about the strangeness of the number from William Burroughs. Burroughs met a sea captain called Captain Clark in Algiers in 1960, who boasted to him that he had never had an accident in 23 years. Later that day Clark's boat sank, killing him and everyone on board. Burroughs was thinking about this an
d reflecting on the nature of fate when he heard a radio report about a plane crash in Florida. The plane's pilot was called Captain Clark and the plane was flight 23.

  Burroughs began noting down incidents of the number 23, and soon Wilson was doing the same. It seemed that wherever there was a significant incident, frequently linked to birth or death, the number 23 would appear. Babies get 23 chromosomes from each parent, for example. In the I-Ching, 23 means 'breaking apart'. The most common psalm at funerals is psalm 23. An unnatural number of anarchists seemed to have died on the 23rd. There was nothing too unusual about any individual occurrence of the number, but the way they kept turning up was unsettling. There was a certain unnerving quality about the places they tended to appear. Wilson filled the Illuminatus! books with the 23 Enigma, as it became known. It fitted in well with a Discordian principle called the Law of Fives, because 2+3=5. The Law of Fives states that everything is related to the number five, assuming that you look hard enough.

  As an example of how the 23s mount up, and deliberately limiting ourselves only to things discussed in this book, we can make a list like the following:

  Bill Drummond was 23 when he worked on the Illuminatus! play, which had 23 cast members. Jung's dream about Liverpool that inspired O’Hallighan and Campbell was on page 223 of Carl Jung's Dreams, Memories and Reflections (Jung, of course, was the man who coined the word 'synchronicity.') Robert Anton Wilson's oldest daughters were born on 23rd August and the 23rd of February, and he first started hearing voices in his head on 23rd July. Drummond and Cauty burnt the million pounds on August 23rd 1994 (1+9+9+4 = 23). Doctorin' The TARDIS was released on 23rd May, the car had 23 painted on its roof and the Turner Prize incident occurred on November 23rd. November 23rd was also a Discordian Holy Day (being Harpo Marx's birthday), the date when Ken Campbell's Illuminatus! was first performed, the date this book was published and, in 1963, the date that Doctor Who was first broadcast. That first episode of Doctor Who was 23 minutes long, and it would be the disastrous 23rd series of Doctor Who that resulted in Ken Campbell and his protégé Sylvester McCoy auditioning for the role.