“Money is not what it used to seem to be” is the opening line in John Waters’ most recent article, Fake Money as Cluster Bomb. He argues that money has ceased, in a sense, to be real, and has become instead a chimera. It is, in effect, a strange sort of weapon used to coerce our societies to morph into the form chosen not by the people but by bureaucrats in think tanks and international institutions.
When governments used to say, “There is no money, we cannot do that,” money remained real. Now, all reality is gone and the impossible becomes possible. Political will is no longer restrained. This has a profoundly corrupting effect.
Money used to mean work. Now, money means gambling (on stock and money markets) and theft (via inflation and occasionally with more honesty via taxation). Again, the link to the real is destroyed. In Waters’ home country, the politicians proclaim that Ireland is the richest country in the world. The Irish people laugh at this unreal statement. But they cannot create real change in a system which is increasingly based on mere fabrications.
Debt has gone out of control; and human desires have gone along with it. We are living beyond our means and the result is a coming poverty for our children, who can no longer afford the lives we once took for granted.
And amidst the unreality, we find mass unemployment—worklessness—and simultaneously a shortage of workers.
Waters writes that “smirking scoundrels” rule over us only because of the falsity of what has replaced real money. As a result, we have a society of lies where morals are inverted. Evil has become good and black has become white. The destruction of our civilisation has become a profitable business.
John Waters concludes that there are indeed links between these three things: money, perverted desire and evil.