'Confidence Trick'

Early in the 1950s John Wyndham used the phrase 'Confidence Trick' as the title for a short story. In it, a group of people are killed while travelling on the London underground. The train they are on takes them to a place full of brimstone and sulphur where there are advertisements for products to deal with burns.

Some of the passengers find it hard to accept that they have not gone directly to heaven: ('Undoubtedly there has been a departmental error in my case, which I hope will be rectified soon'). But they all believe that they have arrived in Hell.

However one of the passengers realises the ludicrousness of the situation, and declares quietly at first: 'I don't believe it'. At his third shouted repetition Hell crumbles and fades away.

All well and good. But when they are disgorged back to the land of the living he stands in front of the Bank of England and says the same thing again. And as the building starts to sway and the ground begins to tremble, one of his fellow-passengers pushes this dangerously subversive disbeliever under a bus. 'No telling what might have happened. A menace to society, that young man,' he said. 'They ought to give me a medal'

God and Mammon

St Paul declared the love of money to be the root of all evil¹. It is interesting that he specified the love of money. He could have mentioned power and the corruption it brings, or sexual depravity and the murders it can lead to. Instead, he named one of the few things in his or any other time which requires the same relationship between itself and people as that required by a god.

Only some gods require worship, but all gods require belief. Pratchett spent an entire book ² exploring the idea that a deity is only powerful in the world in proportion to the power of the belief in him. In exactly the same way that a currency is only powerful in the world in proportion to our confidence in it.

We acknowledge this in our phraseology. We call the currency in the US 'the Almighty Dollar', implying a divine omnipotence. We say 'the pound is strong' or 'the Euro fell' as if they are separate entities. What actually happens is that more people believe in the pound on this particular day than believe in the Euro. Their power is changed in proportion to our beliefs.

It's made round to go round

But what are they actually believing in? Chambers defines money as: 'Pieces of stamped metal used in commerce; any currency used in the same way,' and currency as: 'that which circulates, esp the money of a country'. Neither of which definitions is particularly helpful, and both of which ignore one of the fundamental things about money.

Money is worthless.

Money is - quite literally - not worth the paper it is written on.

Money has no intrinsic value at all.

It gains all of its value from the value we place on it.

A woollen blanket has an inherent value if you are cold. Food has an inherent value if you are hungry. But gold is just a pretty metal which reasonably rare and which has certain interesting chemical properties. There are industrial uses for gold (as connectors for hi-fi leads, for example) but the value we give to gold is far above its intrinsic worth. And money itself can really only be used for decorating the backs of bars and making sure that long case clocks run on time.

But we give money the power of life and death over us. The starving in South Africa, and indeed the starving on the streets of America and Europe, are not starving because of lack of food. They are starving because they have no money to buy food. There is food enough in this world to feed us all. The reason why millions die each year from hunger is that we choose not to give them food for free. It seems that St Paul had a point.

Nothing up my sleeves

But these days money is not even cash.

Money is a stream of data. In fact as Stuart Wilde points out, we all have millions of dollars passing through our bodies all of the time. The fact that they pass through in the form of wireless data-transmissions does not make them any less real. Or more accurately, when those data-transmissions hit bank accounts they are no more real than they were when they were passing through the window of the sports shop or the woman queuing for the bus.

We are part of a mass-hysteria six-billion-people-strong. If someone does not have enough money, they will believe themselves to be in deep s**t. And because they, and the rest of us, believe it so strongly it is true. They are in deep s**t.

On the 5th of September 1929 Roger Babson observed: Sooner or later a crash is coming, and it may be terrific... factories will shut down ... men will be thrown out of work... the vicious circle will get in full swing and the result will be a serious business depression.³ Babson did not cause the crash which started that day, but his warning highlights the power of money. And Godley and Creme's line You gotta be cool on Wall Street, when your index is low⁴ adds a comment about the power of belief.

A commodity in limited supply

What is interesting is that our belief in money has increased at the same time as three other things have been happening.

Firstly we have moved further away from working with things which have an inherent value. If you are a farmer, the crops and machinery and animals you work with have an inherent value. If you do physical labour, from building to coooking, you are working with things which have an inherent value. But fewer people work in that way. The new jobs created are for people to provide customer service, or high quality consultancy, or other chimeral mind-f***s.

Secondly most peoples' work takes them away from physical reality, we have come to value physical work, and indeed physical realities, less and less. It seems we can only value or reward the intangible.

Thirdly the scope of money has increased dramatically, even in the last 150 years. People in cash-less or cash-limited societies barter. It used to be perfectly possible to function without money in areas where solid things were being exchanged. If I give you my eggs for your vegetables we both get a varied diet. But as most of us move away from dealing directly with things, (even simple things, like knitting jumpers or baking cakes), we need money as a neutral means of exchange.

And fourthly, as the reach of money has waxed our belief in traditional gods - whether they are old men on clouds, or young men with wounds in the wrists and ankles, or green men in the woods - has waned over much the same time period.

It is almost as if there is only so much belief in the world, and it has to be applied to something which does not exist. The more money becomes dislocated from reality, the more it appears we beleive in it.

As Douglas Adams said in the third paragraph of 'The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy':

This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.