I would like to conclude with an excerpt from an essay by Andrei Codrescu lamenting the opening of a new Burger King restaurant:
Someone [said] that the reason we treat animals so badly is because they don’t have any money. We treat children badly for the same reason, though we don’t eat them. Perhaps the time has come for animals to get paid for what they do. Perhaps the time has come for us to eat our children. Or maybe we should just tear down the Burger Kings.1
13
THE INTENTIONAL ECONOMY
DANIEL PINCHBECK
While exploring shamanism and non-ordinary states, I discovered the power of intention. According to the artist Ian Lungold, who lectured brilliantly about the Mayan calendar before his untimely death in 2005, the Maya believe that your intention is as essential to your ability to navigate reality as your position in time and space. If you don’t know your intention, or if you are operating with the wrong intentions, you are always lost, and can only get more dissolute.
This idea becomes exquisitely clear during psychedelic journeys, when your state of mind gets intensified and projected kaleidoscopically all around you. As our contemporary world becomes more and more psychedelic, we are receiving harsh lessons in the power of intention on a vast scale. Over the last decades, the international financial elite manipulated the markets to create obscene rewards for themselves at the expense of poor and middle class people across the world. Using devious derivatives, cunning CDOs (collateralized debt obligations), and other trickery, they siphoned off ever-larger portions of the surplus value created by the producers of real goods and services, contriving a debt-based economy that had to fall apart. Their own greed—such a meager, dull intent—has now blown up in their faces, annihilating, in slow motion, the corrupt system built to serve them.
Opportunities such as the current economic meltdown don’t come along very often and should be seized once they appear. When the edifice of mainstream society suddenly collapses, as is happening now, it is a fantastic time for artists, visionaries, mad scientists, and seers to step forward and present a well-defined alternative. What is required, in my opinion, is not some moderate proposal or incremental change, but a complete shift in values and goals, making a polar reversal of our society’s basic paradigm. If our consumer-based, materialism-driven model of society is dissolving, what can we offer in its place? Why not begin with the most elevated intentions? Why not offer the most imaginatively fabulous systemic redesign?
The fall of capitalism and the crisis of the biosphere could induce mass despair and misery, or they could impel the creative adaptation and conscious evolution of the human species. We could attain a new level of wisdom and build a compassionate global society in which resources are shared equitably while we devote ourselves to protecting threatened species and repairing damaged ecosystems. Considering the lightning-like pace of global communication and new social technologies, this change could happen with extraordinary speed.
To a very great extent, the possibilities we choose to realize in the future will be a result of our individual and collective intention. For instance, if we maintain a puritanical belief that work is somehow good in and of itself, then we will keep striving to create a society of full employment, even if those jobs become “green collar.” A more radical viewpoint perceives most labor as something that could become essentially voluntary in the future. The proper use of technology could allow us to transition to a post-scarcity leisure society, in which the global populace spends its time growing food, building community, making art, making love, learning new skills, and deepening self-development through spiritual disciplines such as yoga, tantra, shamanism, and meditation.
One common perspective is that the West and Islam are engaged in an intractable conflict of civilizations, and the hatred and terrorism can only get worse. Another viewpoint could envision the Judeo-Christian culture of the West finding common ground and reconciling with the esoteric core, the metaphysical purity, of the Islamic faith. It seems—to me anyway—that we could find solutions to all of the seemingly intractable problems of our time once we are ready to apply a different mindset to them. As Einstein and others have noted, we don’t solve problems through employing the type of thinking that created them, but rather dissolve them when we reach a different level of consciousness.
We became so mired in our all-too-human world that we lost touch with the other, elder forms of sentience all around us. Along with delegates to the UN, perhaps we could train cadres of diplomats to negotiate with the vegetal, fungal, and microbial entities that sustain life on earth? The mycologist Paul Stamets proposes that we create a symbiosis with mushrooms to detoxify ecosystems and improve human health. The herbalist Morgan Brent believes psychoactive flora like ayahuasca and peyote are “teacher plants,” sentient emissaries from super-intelligent nature, trying to help the human species find its niche in the greater community of life. When we pull back to study the hapless and shameful activity of our species across the earth, these ideas do not seem very far-fetched.
In fact, the breakdown of our financial system has not altered the amount of tangible resources available on our planet. Rather than trying to rejigger an unjust debt-based system that artificially maintains inequity and scarcity, we could make a new start. We could develop a different intention for what we are supposed to be doing together on this swiftly tilting planet, and institute new social and economic infrastructure to support that intent.
14
AN ARMY OF JACKS TO FIGHT THE POWER
PETER LAMBORN WILSON
In fairy tales, humans can possess exterior souls, things magically containing or embodying individual life force—stone, egg, ring, bird or animal, etc. If the thing is destroyed, the human dies. But while the thing persists, the human enjoys a kind of immortality or at least invulnerability.
Money can be seen as such an exteriorized soul. Humans created it, in some sense, in order to hide their souls in things that could be locked away (in tower or cave) and hidden so their bodies would acquire magical invulnerability: wealth, health, enjoyment, and power over enemies—even over fate.
But these exterior souls need not be hidden away—they can be divided almost indefinitely and circulated, exchanged for desire, passed on to heirs like an immortal virus—or rather like a dead thing that magically contains life and “begets” itself endlessly in usury. It constitutes humanity’s one really totally successful experiment in magic: no one calls the bluff, and after six thousand years, it seems like nature. (In fact, an old Chinese cosmogonic text claimed the two basic principles of the universe are water and money.)
It’s worth noting that in märchen, or folktales, the characters with external souls are often the villains. Clearly, the practice must appear uncanny to any normal society, in which magic (call it collective consciousness in active mode) is channeled through ritual and custom to the life of all—not the aggrandizement of one against all (black magic or witchcraft). Yet in the form of money, the exterior soul, shattered into fragments, is put into circulation but also stolen, monopolized, and guarded by dragons—so that some unlucky humans can be stripped of all soul, while others gorge or hoard up soul-bits of ancestors and victims in their ghoulish caves or “banks.”
The beloved in the tale may also have an exterior soul. It falls into the grasp of the evil sorcerer or dragon and must be rescued. In other words, desire, which is alienated (reified, fetishized) in the form of a symbolic object, can only be restored to its true fate (love) by reappropriation from the expropriator, stealing it back from the wizard. The task falls to “Jack,” the third and youngest, sometimes an orphan or disinherited, possibly a fool, a peasant with more heart than any prince, generous, bold, and lucky.
Exactly the same story can be seen acted out in every honest ethnographic report on the introduction of money into some pre-monetary tribal economy. Even without the usual means of force, terror, oppression, colonialist imperialism, or missionary zeal, money alone destroys every n
ormal culture it touches.
CARGO CULTS AND GHOST DANCES
Interestingly, in nearly every case, some sort of messianic movement, cargo cult, or Ghost Dance–type resistance movement springs up within a generation or two after first alien contact. These cults invariably make appeal to spirits (or even demons when circumstances really begin to deteriorate) for the power to overcome money, to “provide good things” without recourse to the black magic of money and the vampirization of other peoples’ external souls—to combat the malignancy of wealth that is not shared.
This is a major trope in all the tales. Jack gives away part of his last loaf precisely to the power-animal or shaman or old lady with the very gift he’ll need in his quest, but he gives unwittingly, not in expectation of exchange. Jack always stands for what Karl Polanyi and Marcel Mauss call the economy of the gift.
A great many fairy tales must have originated in “folk memories” of earlier nonhierarchal social structures, embodied in narrative (myth) and ritual, and given focus during the period when this ancient polity was threatened and finally overcome by later or alien systems—particularly by money, by the coins that always appear in these tales.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon believed that people originally invented money a means to pry loose and force into circulation the hoarded wealth of the “dragon,” the oppressor class. This idea has interesting resonances.
It points to the fact that for “the people,” money in hand represents not oppression but pleasure, gratified desire. Money may not be the root of all evil, but given the existence of money, “love of money” is quite natural. Alchemy epitomizes this jouissance of money in the fairy tale concept of transmutation, production of gold without labor as a free gift of nature to her lovers: Jove’s body as a shower of golden coins.
As a stand-in for “the people,” Jack wins the treasure, but in doing so removes its curse, its dragonish malignancy, because in him the treasure finds its rightful end in happiness (i.e., free distribution, the gift). Hence, the great feast that ends so many tales, and the wedding between peasant lad and princess that levels distinctions and restores external souls to their bodies.
But Proudhon’s notion is contradicted by myth, which attributes the invention of coins to a king—not Croesus of Lydia, who actually did invent coins (seventh century BC), but Midas, who choked on magical gold, his externalized soul. Dionysus and Silenus gave him his wish and then saved him by revoking it, allowing him to vomit all the gold into the river Pactolus in Phrygia.
The historical Midas lived in the eighth century BC, and Phrygia is not far from Lydia, where rivers also ran with gold and electrum and coins first appeared as temple tokens. Coins may seem to regain their innocence when they are spent rather than hoarded, but in fact just at this moment they betray us by leaving us and never returning. In the end, all coins end up in the usurer’s vault. Money is already debt. It says so on the U.S. one-dollar bill, that encyclopedia of hermetic imagery and secret doctrine of money.
JACK NEVER REALLY WINS
Jack’s triumph lies not in the “ever after,” but only in a moment that is forever remembered and invoked as lost. Obviously Jack never really wins, otherwise we wouldn’t call these stories fairy tales and relegate them to the nursery, the savage pre-monetary world of mere childhood. The idea that märchen contain esoteric teachings on economics will probably sound ridiculous, but only to those who’ve never really read them with Polanyi’s or Mauss’s economic anthropology in mind.
The old Russian cycle (Jack = Ivan) strikes me as particularly sensitive to this aspect of the material, almost as if socialism had a subconscious pre-echo in the great Russian fairy tale collections of the early 1900s.
Among the uniquely Slavic motifs of this cycle, everyone loves the tales of Baba Yaga, the little house on great chicken legs that walks and moves wherever the wicked witch desires. The image’s power involves implications that Baba Yaga functions not only as the witch’s house, but also as her external soul. It is both shield and weapon, space and motion, cave and magic carpet. I can’t help thinking of it as a symbol of capital itself, especially in its purely magical end phase in the global era. The Baba Yaga might be an offshore bank ready to pull up stakes and flee to some freer market or a shoe factory on its way to Mexico.
Speaking of Mexico reminds me of a story about the Mexican Revolution: around 1910, thousands of North American anarchists, Wobblies, and adventurers crossed the border under false generic names to join Pancho Villa or the Magonistas and thus came to be called the “Army of Smiths.”
Given the proliferation and gigantism of Baba Yaga in our times, perhaps what we need is an Army of Jacks.
15
ONE THOUSAND WORDS ABOUT WHERE FREE MUSIC IS TAKING US
PAUL D. MILLER,
AKA DJ SPOOKY THAT SUBLIMINAL KID
I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.
—John Cage
In a race, the quickest runner can never overtake the slowest, since the pursuer must first reach the point whence the pursued started, so that the slower must always hold a lead …
—Aristotle, Physics
Warning: This text contains uncredited samples. The smart reader is advised to search online for terms in various sentences to find out the context. Simply type them into a decent search engine, and see what else pops up in the browser.
Begin: These days, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we’re faced with a kind of social entropy. Whenever one is exposed to the financial world there’s a kind of surrealism to the situation. Credit default swaps, futures markets, abstract financial instruments: these are terms based on complex, expensive loans that most people don’t understand. But what makes all of this converge on the topic I’m writing about—“economics” as it relates to cultural production—is a kind of pro forma switch between artistic practice and how the world is represented. Think of it this way: economics, the “dismal science,” is for most people the “real” of the real, the financial underpinnings of modern life in an information based economy. Let’s take a look at the root of economics: eco is derived from the Greek term oikonomia (oikos—“house” and nomos—“custom”). It’s resonant with the later Latin-derived term credit, derived from creder, which simply means “to believe.”
This is exactly what the founder of modern economics, Adam Smith, meant when he said “all money is a matter of belief.” Or even more when he said “on the road from the City of Skepticism, I had to pass through the Valley of Ambiguity.” What kind of music comes out of these statements?
Let’s put it this way: the absolute top-selling album of all time is the blank CD. More than the Beatles, more than Elvis, Bob Marley, or Michael Jackson—I’m talking about the simple utilitarian object of the humble 700 megabyte CD. Why? Here’s the basic scenario: when you face the idea that digital reproduction equals infinite abundance, the result is that you have so many options available that the normal business model of scarcity simply no longer applies. And so music should be, could be, and will be free. It’s that simple. Infinite amount of copies equals zero value. You resequence, resplice, and redice the materials of your audio or video archive because your individual choice is what gives the situation a robust and deeply personal satisfaction. The consumer is sovereign in this scenario, and the cultural producer becomes content for the palette of the consumer. The abundance of music, its low cost, and its widespread availability contribute to the sense that all music from every part of recorded history is equally available, and can be mixed together into new forms. In a networked economy, the simplest of terms: anything that can be digital, will be. And that scenario, in turn, fosters the end of normal economics in the culture industry—that’s the real freakonomics. And no, I don’t have any nostalgia for the old music industry model of the album—it was always an artificial construct to boost profits for the major record labels. Music was better when people had to put more creative intent into the
single. But I do think that the vinyl LP will outlast CDs precisely because it’s got collectors appeal—it’s become scarce in a way that fosters real value.
In the twenty-first century we face so many variables about what it means to “believe” in a system: a computer operating system? A church? A “lifestyle?” I love to play with these kinds of conjunctions, because, put simply, that’s about all that makes any of this make sense: it’s all a kind of theater, a place where we create roles, and read from a script made of numbers that many of us don’t understand. Ask your average person on the street—we in the United States face a scenario anticipated by Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street, who sneers at the belief of the audience in morality, and simply says, “90 percent of Americans have no net worth.” Almost true …
What Comes After Money Page 14