This piece was first published on the author's Substack blog and is reproduced with the author’s permission.
Jesus Drives Money Changers from the Temple. Then they came to Jerusalem. And He entered the temple area and began to drive out those who were selling and buying on the temple grounds, and He overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who were selling doves; and He would not allow anyone to carry merchandise through the temple grounds. And He began to teach and say to them, ‘Is it not written: “My house will be called a house of prayer for all the nations”? But you have made it a den of robbers.
— The Gospel of Mark, 11:15–17
Money is — clearly — not what it used to seem to be. Once it was the measure of human work, and genius, and produce, by virtue of being the token of reward for all these. Now it is as though the measure of the threat to our civilisation.
Once, not long ago, there was no money for anything. It was sometimes called ‘austerity’, but more often ‘tight budgetary policy’. Now, it seems, there is no scarcity of money. In Ireland, for example, whereas for more than a decade there has been a visible and much-debated ‘housing crisis’, with thousands of Irish families languishing on the housing lists, there was nothing to be done because there was ‘no money’.
Now, there is an abundance of money to house migrants from all over the world in five-star hotels and stately homes, to kit them out in the latest Nikes, and Levi’s with the pockets padded with bill rolls, and passports paid for out of petty cash, but still those thousands of Irish families languish on the housing lists. There is ‘no money’ to help them, and anyone who says that this is unjust is instantly recognisable as a racist.
The love of money is the root of all evil. In June, a month of compulsory celebration of LGBT power and menace kicks off right across the globe, mostly financed from the pockets of people who have no right to speak against what is, in truth, a massive exercise in bullying and intimidation, and, even more fundamentally, an attack on the values and morals of Western civilisation, and — far less abstractly — upon its children.
Money is no object when it comes to sexual perversion, cultural railroading and camouflaged noncery. Here in Ireland, last Friday night, the final episode of the long-running talkshow, The Late Late Show, involved a charity fundraiser which resulted in a €58,000 donation to BeLonGTo (a LGBT+ youth organisation) and a rather more modest €20,000 to a children's cancer charity.
A tweet from Women, Children and Family Advocate captured the secret thoughts of many watching:
There's no € to be made from terminally ill children but a lot to be made from confused, vulnerable children with mental health issues. Karma won’t be kind to these evil people.
Money is no longer money. It is a weapon of war, used by those who are charged with its custody against those to whom it is supposed to belong.
False money destroys economies, nations and communities.
Money is exchange, value and reward
Earlier this month, the UK Spectator reported on a strange syndrome afflicting the British economy: mass unemployment combined with a shortage of workers.
The economy of Manchester, in the north, is floundering for want of workers. With more than 40,000 jobs currently advertised in the city, almost nobody is prepared to work for the rates on offer: £10.75 per hour as a stockroom assistant in Ann Summers, £14 an hour as an exam invigilator, £75,000 a year as a sales manager with a chemical company, or as a trainee army officer at £34,000 for the first year.
Even though 18 per cent of Mancunians are claiming unemployment or sick benefits, nobody wants these jobs. Birmingham, Liverpool and Glasgow tell the same story. In Blackpool, close to a quarter of the population is out of work. Nationwide, claims for sick benefits have doubled since the lockdowns, with most of the increase spoken for by mental health conditions.
It is obvious that this has to do mainly with the fallout from the Covid subterfuge, though not even the Spectator is willing to spell this out — its main point being that the Government has simply upped levels of immigration to take up the slack:
While the first wave of mass immigration in recent decades was an unforeseen consequence of expanding the European Union, this one is planned. The Tories have taken back control and used it to ramp up immigration to a level that New Labour would never have dared attempt.
This is newsworthy, but beside the point. During the fake pandemic, the UK Government paid workers 80 percent of their incomes to stay home. Now it expresses puzzlement because a worker who earned £344 per week for not stacking shelves in Ann Summers is disinclined to go back to stacking shelves in Ann Summers for a differential of £2.15 per hour.
The Spectator article puts it mostly down to Brexit, but you don’t need to be a conspiracist to detect that the situation now facing the UK is due to something more like a pincer movement of Covid insanity and problem-reaction-solution scenario.
Fake money changes everything. There is nothing that is safe from it or immune to it. Fiat money is fake money: tokens of exchange that really represent nothing except civilisational destruction.
In his recently published book, The Natural Order of Money, Roy Sebag defines what money rightly is:
Definition VII. Money. Money is an energy embodiment which serves as a common measure and a reward for economic activity. Money extends the natural standard imposed upon the real economy to all members of an economic system, promoting cooperation while reflecting ecological accountability as its guiding principle.
The point of money is to facilitate the exchange of labour, products and services, to retain a measure of the value of real things and phenomena, and to allow for an efficient system of rewarding those who contribute to the good of a human society.
To believe that money itself is the valuable thing is not merely to lose the economic plot, but to misunderstand human existence. To ‘trade’ not in things that humans need and desire, but in the tokens by which they have arranged to exchange these quantities, is to make inevitable the enormous distortions that now cripple our nations.
Debt is enslavement
Money is supposed to belong to the people, but has become the instrument of the people’s enslavement. The means of this enslavement is debt creation, which occurs in the name of — and at the same time as — money creation. Debt is therefore the expression of human desire exceeding human capacity to generate human needs.
The process of modern ‘money creation’ could be deemed a form of priestcraft — the manipulation of money systems by powerful bankers, who generate power and wealth for themselves and their accomplices at the expense of social functioning and human security. The chief mechanism is a kind of ex nihilo desubstantiation of the symbols of exchange and wealth retention.
Hence, ‘our’ money system is owned and controlled by privately-owned banks, which create money in the form of debt. In this system, money is generated only when it is borrowed — each new loan means that a specific amount of money is brought into being.
When the loan is eventually repaid, the capital is eliminated. Meanwhile, somewhat greater amounts of new debt materialise in the form of interest, which continue to exist as a negative phenomenon, without any positive corresponding element of wealth or tokens. The growing accumulation of debt in our economies is not a misfortune, but a structural inevitability: The continuing scramble to find money to pay down interest means that the only way debt repayments can be discharged is by borrowing more money, which throws the structural flaw into a new and wider orbit.
The generalised accumulation of debts in the system, without any basis other than on the computer screen of the lenders, means that there is a diminishing pool of ‘money’ with which these mounting debts can be paid down.
Hence, ‘our’ money systems generate debt as a direct function of their structural incoherence, in much the way a barber shop ‘produces’ tufts of hair. But debt cannot be swept up and put in a wheelie bin, which is perhaps why economists are forever talking about haircuts and hairshirts.
Every euro minted in the European economy, or dollar in the US economy, comes into being as a debt, which, from the moment of its generation, is subject to interest, taxation and other incidental charges. Since there is no way of generating financial resources other than the money-as-debt model, it is impossible for all of these additional charges to be met by everyone upon whom they are levied.
So, all of us scramble around competing to scrape together handfuls of money to pay ever-increasing tariffs from a diminishing pool of money. Wealth, we awake to realise, has become nothing more than an ongoing capacity to keep our debts paid up, which becomes harder and harder. This is not merely unsustainable, but terminally so.
These, rather than a virus or a pandemic, are the circumstances that have delivered us to this moment. What the World Bank subsequently called the ‘Covid project’ flowed directly from an alert issued to the G20 and several supranational bodies, on 15 August 2019 — Assumption Day — by BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset-management agency, warning that the world’s economies and currencies were on the brink, and that an extreme intervention would be required to deal with the coming downturn by placing the world’s economy in an induced coma.
Perverse incentives
In that retroactively spectral period just before the ‘pandemic’, an odd phenomenon erupted around Ireland, for which no explanation was yet available to fit the facts of the moment. This was the emergence of a sudden rash of charging posts for electric cars — all for use free of charge — in odd sections of filling stations, opposite drive-thru McDonalds, in the corners of vast carparks.
Even stranger was that, here and there throughout the country, for no apparent reason, among the standard charging points for generic electric cars, there would be a batch of dedicated charging points — greater in number — for one particular type of electric car, a car named for a Serbian-American inventor of the late 19th and early 20th century, Nikola Tesla, who had reputedly invented a wireless system for generating electricity that had been suppressed because it was feared it would destroy the oil business.
The puzzle in this was, or seemed to be, that there were almost no Teslas on the road, and these charging points were accordingly almost totally unused. They stood as though the graveyards of a lost civilisation, some miracle of Norman democratic impulse or desiring, looming there like Megalith monuments, seeming to have forgotten their function or not yet having been allocated one. Very, very occasionally, when you had gotten used to seeing them, you would, in passing with the usual reluctant curiosity, take a second or third glance to find that a vehicle of some kind was actually charging there, and you and others would ramble over to kick its tyres — in spite, or envy, or muted admiration.
They were cars alright, but not as we had known them. Their odd, somewhat clumsy but beautiful shapes drew ambiguous glances, as might a beautiful girl in a tutu and Doc Martens. Who might own such a car? was, more or less, the unspoken question still hovering in the ante-chamber of everyone’s larynx. Did they know something we didn’t?
Then came 2020. A few months into the ‘pandemic’ — by late summer, certainly — something even stranger started to manifest. More and more of these Teslas became visible on the roads and at the charging points. Suddenly, it seemed not to make sense but as though to provide, at last, some kind of justification for something that had before seemed like a strange constellation of art installations, monuments to a future that seemed unlikely.
More and more Teslas were to be seen charging at these post-historic sites. Some were beautiful, though always in a way that seemed flawed, as though to humanise them. Others were almost ordinary, nondescript, but with a hint of the same gawky grace. For the first time in history, it seemed that it had become possible to live horse and get grass.
Prices of the Teslas ranged between 50 grand and approximately three times that, but more models, some costing in excess of 200 grand, were promised to be in the works. As more and more became known about what might be happening to the world, it was as though the Tesla had been invented to became the receptacle for money that had no other place to go, as well as being a statement about the owner’s position in a future that would become more and more inhospitable for most people who had no money left to go anywhere (but would be ‘happy’ in their immobility). As the ‘pandemic’ rolled on, with the world’s businesses largely in hibernation, people who had already been rich seemed to be getting richer, while those who hadn’t became decidedly poorer, but invisibly, at least to themselves.
Once, one of the chief virtues of money was that it was scarce. This was what caused its value to track the greatest effort and virtue and enterprise of men. Now that it is plentiful — if only for certain things — we must surely know that something has gone badly wrong.
Little more than a decade or so in the past, it was as though money had all but become extinct. Now, our governments splash it around the place on things we did not ask for: cycle lanes that turn our public thoroughfares into Olympic stadia; street furniture that no one ever sits upon; the purchase of farms for the purpose of closing them down; modular homes for unvetted migrants while native citizens sleep in tents; roadworks that never end.
Moral causes
The present calamity is the culmination of a process of an unravelling of Western civilisation that has been in train for some time, perhaps a century or even more, when, all the while without our suspecting, all the conventions and protections we had allowed ourselves to believe existed as our guarantees of freedom and opportunity were being broken apart and carted away to the scrapyard, under our very noses.
The issue arising, then, is not that unless we defeat the evils now confronting us, ‘we shall not have a civilisation’. The issue is that we do not have a civilisation, and have not had one for a long time. If we had, then the people now in charge of our countries would never have risen above the roles of nightclub doormen, or traffic wardens. They would certainly not be in positions where they could help to dismantle the millennia-old understandings that served to create the greatest civilisation the world has ever witnessed.
Nowadays, we hear nothing but talk of the excesses and extravagances of that civilisation, and nothing of the great principles and ideals — for the greater part of heroism, sacrifice and postponement — that brought it into being. Now, too, we hear only words of contempt for the founders of that civilisation, those men of steel and iron, grey of hair and suit, who placed a restraining hand on zealotry and exuberance when it came to matters of public interest or concern, knowing that this would unleash the pent-up energies of their people in the direction of a better future.
These now quaint-seeming individuals, who spoke in resonating sentences evoking great passions and visions, who seemed to hold the public interest as the dearest thing, and whose private lives and deeds, where visible, found the purest harmony with their words, are spoken of by knaves and imbeciles as though their efforts had caused nothing but grief and destruction.
Now, their places are taken by smirking scoundrels, for whose venality, fecklessness and ignorance no words have yet been invented — insipid creatures of ambiguous sexuality, puffed up with a power corruptly acquired, drunk on a cheap pseudo-passion for the rights of degenerates to trample over every institution of man, working from morning until night to dismantle the very walls of their nations and civilisation — and enabled in all this by the availability of fake money, a commodity that trumps all others precisely because it is worthless.
We must conclude that this was not an accident, but an orchestrated imposition of the most vapid mediocrity upon the institutions of state and culture. If we look back, we can see the signs: the handing upwards of the people’s power, generally under false pretences, the quiet, disillusioned withdrawal of good men and true, the weeding out of discordant voices, the elevation of a new kind of ‘hero’ — one who came to notice because he seemed to be the very antithesis of the good and the true.
What real money cannot do
All this was enabled by money, but here we stumble upon an extraordinary truth: Money of the old kind could not have facilitated such an insurgency of mediocrity, for it was hard come by and there were better uses for it. The new dispensation became possible as the direct and inevitable consequence of the explosion in political life of Toytown money in a process sometimes referred to as ‘quantitive easing’ (QE), itself a by-product of the aforementioned incoherence of fiat currencies and the associated phenomenon of fractional reserve banking.
The effects of false money sloshing around our economies can hardly be over-emphasised, and yet it is rarely if ever talked about. This fake money is as though a cancer has metastasised and ripped through the entire corpora of multiple nations, infecting everything and everyone, directly or indirectly, until all human hopes and morale have begun to unravel and disintegrate.
It is what motivates the doctor who lines up his patients for an injection he already knows may injure or kill them, while assuring himself and all within earshot that he is ‘saving lives’. It is the impetus and conscience-salver of the nurse who, with apparent equanimity, could turn people away from the ward in which their beloved, having been brought to death’s door on a ventilator, cling to life in the vain hope of saying goodbye to those they have loved — and, afterwards, having despatched the body to the mortuary, lets off steam by executing complex dance moves for a TikTok video.
It is the fuel that propels the twisted journaliar to launch attacks on ‘far righters’ whom he knows to be the kind of people he once, a long time ago, had been educated to emulate or even become. Fake money is a dissolver of principle and an antidote to tribal solidarity. It is ultimately what causes the formerly drum-beating nationalist politician to dispense sneers and menaces in the direction of people who are pleading to know why their country is being thrown to wolves, a plausible pre-echo of being told by their children’s rapists to shut up and enjoy the show.
The evils that have been unleashed in the past three years — albeit with their roots in a prior, preparatory putrescence of indeterminate duration — can chiefly be seen as arising from the availability of a form of money which exists solely for the execution of evil. False money is at the root of every one of the unholy things we have witnessed for the past three years, and which continue in the face of pleading by decent, honourable people, while the majority stands silently, idly by, waiting for a slice of the action.
Fake money results in terrible and otherwise incomprehensible outcomes that contradict every principle ever uttered in the time when money was a scarce token of exchange in respect of necessities and of reward for doing good things. Once money ceased to be seen as a tool, and became itself the coveted substance, immorality was inevitable. Fake money begets societies comprising of nothing but lies. It is the bastard offspring of materialism at its extremes.
Professional liars
Fake money eats into everything and is ultimately what produces the sense of strangeness we have experienced in the past 40 months. We gave too much credence, in 2020, to the idea that the strange behaviour of politicians and doctors and pseudo-scientists and journaliars had to do with fear, or (even more naively of us) with a genuine desire to save people from death or illness or suffering. They were all the time following the instructions of the false money, which held for them a mesmerising power far superior to hypnosis.
And, while it has been important to examine some of the more arcane contributors to our calamitous situation — propaganda, mass formation, groupthink, the slow death of the constitutional republic, et cetera — there is a much more immediate and obvious factor that we tend to misread: the power of a perverted money system to corrupt every and any institution, individual or group.
Perhaps, then, it was nothing like as complicated as we have been imagining. Perhaps there was no need for us to ponder whether they were being threatened or blackmailed: maybe inducement provided the single-word explanation for everything that was happening. They were as whores, inured and indifferent to morals or scruples.
Money always held out the possibility of corrupting our civilisation. Ten years ago, a study by researchers from the universities of Harvard and Utah, published in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, suggested that people are more likely to lie or make immoral decisions after being exposed to money-related words. The findings showed that ‘even if we are well intentioned, even if we think we know right from wrong, there may be factors influencing our decisions and behaviours that we’re not aware of,’ one of the co-authors said.
The study asked college students studying business to make sentences out of various word clusters before answering questions and playing several games. Some of the phrases contained a financial focus such as ‘She spends money liberally,’ and others that were neutral, such as ‘She walked on grass.’
Researchers found that people who were exposed to the financial phrases lied more often in subsequent activities if they knew doing so would earn them more money. Subjects shown the money-related words were also more likely to make an unethical decision even when there was no direct financial reward, such as hiring someone who promises to share insider information concerning a competitor. Even the word ‘dollar’, they discovered, had the power to quiet an individual conscience.
In another study, by a group in UC Berkeley, a fake game of Monopoly was secretly filmed in which players were unevenly endowed with ‘money’. The hidden cameras exposed the ‘rich’ players moving their pieces more loudly around the board, and celebrating their ‘wins’ with whoops and jeers and becoming increasingly rude to their opponents who’d drawn the short straws.
At the end, the ‘rich’ players’ talked as though they had earned their success, even though the game was manifestly rigged, and their win should have been seen as inevitable. This tells us that, in general, our concepts of reward have become perverted by cultures in which money has, for some, become easier to come by, and confers benefits regardless of effort or integrity.
We know also that rich people are proportionately less generous than poor people: They give away significantly smaller shares of their wealth. In California, where drivers are legally required to stop for pedestrians, a study showed that half of expensive cars would fail to stop for pedestrians, whereas none of the cheaper cars did so.
A study by the University of San Francisco found that poor people were much better than rich people at reading the emotions of the faces of other people in photographs and mock interviews. But, when the wealthy were instructed to imagine themselves in the situation of the people they were looking at, their scores improved.
This tells us what we already intuit: that, as someone’s personal wealth increases, his capacity to feel compassion and empathy reduces, to be supplanted by feelings of ever-mounting entitlement and self-interest. We had a warning of this in the 1987 movie, Wall Street, when we laughed when its anti-hero Gordon Gekko declared that ‘Greed is good!’ This, too, is a perversion — of the natural urge to provide, to go forth and multiply.
Fake money wipes out virtue
Another way of describing what has been happening in our societies in the past three years and counting would be to say that such anti-ethics have wormed their way into the hearts of our power centres, and the convergence of the resulting forces of amorality are now rapidly accelerating the inequality in a culture that had, until what seems like the day before yesterday, claimed to repudiate that phenomenon as no other.
Money, on becoming an addiction, overrides the conscience, and wipes out all virtue.
A psychologist Dr. Tian Dayton, explained that a compulsive need to acquire money is often considered part of a class of behaviours known as 'process addictions’, or ‘behavioural addictions,’ which are distinct from substance abuse.
Process addictions are addictions that involve a compulsive and/or an out-of-control relationship with certain behaviors such as gambling, sex, eating, and, yes, even money . . . There is a change in brain chemistry with a process addiction that’s similar to the mood-altering effects of alcohol or drugs. With process addictions, engaging in a certain activity — say viewing pornography, compulsive eating, or an obsessive relationship with money — can kickstart the release of brain/body chemicals, like dopamine, that actually produce a ‘high’ that’s similar to the chemical high of a drug. The person who is addicted to some form of behavior has learned, albeit unconsciously, to manipulate his own brain chemistry.
He was talking here about the ‘normative’ effect of money on individuals in controlled societal circumstances. He possibly never envisaged that whole societies could be rendered rapt before the power of false money, when all restraint — of individuals, institutions, systems, governments and corporations — may be suppressed by the immediacy of easy opportunity.
These evils arise, it is important to remember, not from money, but from its corruption and corrupted forms. An epidemic of fake money is just about the worst thing that can happen to a society, because it embraces the possibility of just about every other bad thing you can imagine. It facilitates invasion and plunder. It suppresses principle and conscience. It overrules the effects of education and tradition. It dissolves scruples and bids guilt be quiet.
Fake money, once liberated into a society, unleashes a wholesale anarchic attack on the underpinning values of that society, placing at nought the power of restraint, postponement, balance, moderation, discretion, ecological accountability and all concepts of fair dealing. Fake money unravels everything: patriotism, reason, the effects of historical rhetoric, ideology, common sense, religiosity — all these phenomena fall before it.
Fake money dehumanises
Fake money has, in the past three years, made it possible and worthwhile for whole battalions of pseudo-liberals to agree to the complete transformation of their cultures and the obliteration of most of their formerly professed values. It makes possible the now rampant internal racism against the Caucasian populations of multiple Western countries and the prejudice of the well-off towards the working class, and allows respectable middle-class parents to create choruses of approval at the prospect of other people’s children mutilating their bodies in the name of progressivism. It persuades schools, colleges and universities to impose these ideologies on their students in a a non-negotiable way.
It enables those who consider themselves aloof from the consequences of policies like coercive mass inward migration to ‘welcome’ the newcomers they have no intention of helping, and daubing as racists those who honestly declare their fears and doubts about what it happening. It allows newspapers, radio and TV stations and online platforms to provoke and conduct pile-ons against anyone coming to notice for dissenting from these agendas.
But, possibly the worst thing about fake money is that it is not entirely fake. It has the capacity to be real only when the powerful so decide, because the chits and receipts and IOUs survive, even when the safes and bank vaults and wallets are empty. In this regard, though we may have nothing to show for it, we are incurring debts that will eat up the inheritance of our children’s children’s children.
Fake money has costs, but no value. The extent of the effects of false money, because it is false, and therefore quasi-infinite, is incalculable, invisible. But we can observe a qualified measure of it in the excess deaths currently imposing on humanity a new, real and unannounced — and officially ignored — pandemic, for this is a context in which its reality becomes visible and palpable, measurable only in grief and pain.
Wikipedia tells us that:
Counterfeit money is currency produced without the legal sanction of a state or government, usually in a deliberate attempt to imitate that currency so as to deceive its recipient. Producing or using counterfeit money is a form of fraud or forgery, and is illegal. The business of counterfeiting money is nearly as old as money itself.
This summary is accurate enough in respect of situations where small amounts of counterfeit money are introduced by petty criminals or fraudsters, but it does nothing to describe or alert us to the dangers of counterfeit money entering an economy under the supervision of the government.
In this context, the devastation can only be total, for it twists all natural understandings in their seating and places an irrational greed at the centre of everything. This greed replaces normative desires and ambitions for such as livelihood, advancement, security, comfort, land, property and even affection with a frenzied hunger to take advantage of the avalanche while it is in train. It is as if an overhead helicopter has started to rain down hundred-euro notes, and a voice announces via a klaxon that everyone may keep whatsoever he claims. This, in truth, is precisely what is happening:
Helicopter money: A phrase coined by the American economist Milton Friedman in 1969, when he wrote a parable of dropping money from a helicopter to illustrate the effects of monetary expansion. A helicopter drop is an expansionary fiscal or monetary policy that is financed by an increase in an economy's money supply. It could be an increase in spending or a tax cut, but it involves printing large sums of money and distributing it to the public in order to stimulate the economy. Mostly, the term “helicopter drop” is largely a metaphor for unconventional measures to jump-start the economy during deflationary periods, which consist of falling prices.
Friedman elaborated:
Let us suppose now that one day a helicopter flies over this community and drops an additional $1,000 in bills from the sky, which is, of course, hastily collected by members of the community. Let us suppose further that everyone is convinced that this is a unique event which will never be repeated.
$1,000 may seem an inadequate sum with which to dramatise such a thesis in 2023, but today’s equivalent of $8,360 might certainly have an arousing effect on a populace.
We can imagine the effect of a helicopter flying over a small village and letting loose such a sum in large and small denomination bills. It is likely that the populace would emerge, at first sneakily, from their homes and rapidly descend into a kind of mania as they competed to pick up as much as possible of the spoils from the sky.
One would not anticipate hearing them say things like, ‘After you!’ and ‘No, you first!’ What one could expect would be mayhem, as people vied to fill their pockets and shopping bags with as many notes as they could get, with all niceties abandoned in the ensuing scrummage.
Fake money ushers in alien behaviour
Something analogous has obtained in our culture for the past three years, as people acquiesced in behaviours that would normally be alien to them in order to access some of the false money made available for those willing to implement an agenda directed not at building or maintaining human society but pulling it apart for reasons they neither understood nor cared to understand for as long as the money continued to fall from the sky.
These people, not coincidentally, also happened to be the most powerful in terms of the recognition accorded on a hierarchical basis by the society: politicians, doctors, judges, law enforcers, scientists, journalists (so-called), civil servants, et cetera.
The ‘victims’ of these phenomena were chiefly those who had been accustomed to generating their means of survival from their own ingenuity and effort: farmers, shopkeepers, tradesmen, et cetera. As time moved on, however, as already noted, the munificent attentions of the authorities shifted from the indigenous population to the state-invited outsiders, whose pampering appeared to be a form of tease or gaslighting directed at the indigenous population, in particular those who were already impecunious.
What we have been observing, however, resembles more an air raid that a helicopter drop: False money, flipped from its original meaning and purpose, and directed only at evildoing, has functioned more in the manner of cluster bombs aimed at the vulnerable points of the remaining morale of society. In a certain light, the Ukraine war is simply a metaphor for what is happening to the world in general, and the West in particular.
This campaign of supposed plenitude amounts, in the final analysis, to a colossal assault on the laws that govern economic activity, the hardwired connection between work and productivity and measure and rewards, as outlined by Roy Sebag in the aforementioned slim volume, The Natural Order of Money.
It amounts to an attempted terminal assault on the concept of ecological accountability, described also by Sebag, whereby each actor in the economy, no matter how far removed from fundamental processes of production, is bound by the same laws of adherence to reality and its balances, requirements and limits.
It amounts to the final unmooring of money from human activity in the matter of producing and providing essential human needs, and after that non-essentials and luxuries, replacing all this with a formula that dispenses tokens of nothing but untruth, as a burlesquing ‘reward’ for obedience to criminality and the criminals conducting it.
Duped by a mirage
In the Celtic Tiger, the constructed ‘boom’ set in train in late-1990s Ireland as the initiation point of the current wealth coup, the power of cheap money had driven people insane with a desire for property and other tokens of a success that had eluded them in all normative contexts.
Now, three decades later, a similar process has been operating on the capacities of those who already have more than the means of self-sustenance to leverage the resources available through the money system — the circulatory system of society — to accumulate further wealth in a way they imagine will change their lives for ever. Yes, they may have to do hard and unpleasant things, but when it is over, they will drive around in their Teslas and convince themselves that looking to secure their children’s futures has been a worthy and moral exercise.
But all this is a mirage. The money is not real. In a sense, and rather uniquely, the ‘transactions’ have been — secretly, invisibly — karmic and just, for they offer mere time-limited tokens for evil deeds. Nobody knows precisely when the tokens will run out, but those ultimately in charge of their disbursement know that they will eventually become worthless, and that there will therefore be nothing lost to their dispensers arising from their apparent reckless munificence.
Milton Friedman did not anticipate, or at least did not explore, the likely social and moral consequences of helicopter drops. He saw the matter in purely technical terms, a mechanism for effecting a permanent once-off expansion of the amount of money in circulation, which would stimulate spending, expand economic activity and provoke helpful levels of inflation.
He did not foresee that it would stimulate also irrational greed, jealousy, rage, viciousness, violence and hatred, that it would provoke politicians to destroy their countries and dismantle their cultures, prompt regular people to sell out their neighbours and the values that had enabled the construction of their nations.
He did not appear to understand that it might, in a short time, contribute to the overturning of 2,500 years of conditioning in patriotism, democracy, liberalism, tolerance, freedom-reverence, reason and justice-love in bringing about the death-knell of the civilisation once called Christendom.
This may, even by now, be irreversible. To combat and set in reverse what has been occurring, a political movement would need access to the same levels of pseudo-money as the incumbent establishments, and to maintain access to it after gaining power, and use it in a reverse fashion — for the achievement of good — for as long as this was necessary to rebuild Western civilisation. This is next to inconceivable, and so we appear to have painted ourselves into a corner that there is no obvious way of escaping.
Now we begin to comprehend the meaning of all those Teslas. They were the visible evidence of reward for participation in evildoing, the manifestation of the false money in concrete — i.e., alloyed and plastic — form. The Teslas announced themselves as prizes for believing that gravity could be defied.
The rejection of economic fundamentals — and the abuse of the natural law of the land, sea and air implicit in the entire exercise of helicoptering economics — was culminating in the strange shapes of clunky but beautiful cars that seemed to represent the foreshortening of effort by dint of its supplanting by grasping, greed and shamelessness.
And there was another factor: Though not greed-free, the Tesla offered a kind of cut-price reassurance of conscience, for it had — had it not? — a virtuous aspect, that of ‘saving the planet’. Between saving lives and saving the planet, how could greed not be good?
Thus, by Sebag’s definitions, the ‘pandemic’ was a once-off opportunity to cheat nature, to abbreviate the period of effort and pain involved in accumulating enough f***-off money to f*** off with. The problem is that there may be nowhere to go.
Article image: Christ Driving the Money-changers from the Temple (detail), Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts (public domain)
