An Economy of Hot Air

Henry Ford

Henry Ford, who was nobody’s idea of a flaming communist, purportedly said: “It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.” This is, in fact, a paraphrase; the actual quote, from his 1922 memoir, is much wordier and more difficult to parse. But it accurately reflects his belief, that most people don’t realize money doesn’t objectively exist.

Money, Ford acknowledged, isn’t the currency in your pockets. That’s a government-approved substitute which makes money circulate. Money is, functionally, a philosophical abstract, not a thing at all. Money comes into existence when banks loan it, and when the economy contracts—as we’re seeing now, surrounding COVID-19—the missing money simply ceases to exist. Money is the ultimate placebo, functioning entirely because we believe it does.

I remembered this lesson from one of America’s greatest capitalists yesterday, when reading the newest Robert Reich op-ed. Reich, who famously quit the Clinton Administration because he considered it too accommodationist, excoriates rich people’s behavior during this crisis. Some already-rich people, like Jeff Bezos, are hiring new workers to meet the demand placed upon their businesses. But they aren’t offering these new hires basic perks, like sick days, during a pandemic.

Let me flout Leftist orthodoxy and say: Jeff Bezos possibly deserves to be rich. He controls material resources and distribution networks which ordinary workers don’t want and lack skills to maintain. But he also relies upon workers, both his own (warehouse order pickers) and others’ (road maintenance crews) to conduct his business. Therefore, he maybe deserves to be rich, but does he deserve to be, at this writing, $125 billion rich?

Possibly more important, is he really $125 billion rich?

If money doesn’t really exist, as über-capitalist Henry Ford said, what wealth does Bezos really have? Once your accumulated wealth exceeds quantities necessary to pay your bills and we’re dealing with literal fiction. Bezos moves bank data around a fiduciary Shangri-La and, by possessing this fictional resource, changes the value of money possessed by everybody else. Like a supernova, he bends time, space, and the value of a buck.

Jeff Bezos

Unless he converts this money into something which has substance, though, like gold or land or new factory resources, that money remains fictional. Perhaps that’s why, just before COVID-19, Bezos bought the most expensive house in California, a state known for exorbitant real estate values. Only when his fictional money becomes something material, does he actually have wealth. Bezos, who hoards houses, banks on their value tracking forever upward.

That’s why, when Robert Reich suggests taxing Bezos’ wealth at levels consistent with his ability to manipulate the economy, I wonder what he intends to tax. Unoccupied houses? Idle resources, like land, economic futures, and… I’ve literally run out of ideas. Because we cannot confuse “wealth,” something actually taxable, with “money,” which is fictional. When individuals accumulate Bezos-level monetary wealth, it becomes functionally immune to taxes, because it’s like taxing air.

By this I don’t mean Bezos could move money overseas, though he certainly could. Rather, I mean that money at this level serves primarily as a mix of incentive, bargaining chip, and threat. When Amazon offered to expand resources in Staten Island, the entire effort centered on dumping money into a regional economy, and when critics like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez balked, Amazon took the money away. But the money was never there, so it never really left.

Instead, the money simply loomed, like the statue of Christ overlooking Rio de Janeiro. Like Christ, that money had power over people’s lives to exactly the degree they invested faith in it. The money was never really present, just as Christ’s presence (or absence) isn’t dependent on artwork. You can’t tax the population’s general faith in money, because it doesn’t exist in material form. It’s a big, shapeless nothing which nevertheless dominates because we expect it to.

COVID-19 gives us new perspective on this reality. Watching the government basically pull money from thin air, it’s tempting to rhetorically question where wealth comes from. It isn’t from the value of labor, not while work is disappearing. But such rhetorical questions are hot air, because we know the answer. Like Henry Ford wrote nearly a century ago, money is fictional. Like a novelist, the government simply tempts us to believe its story.

Maybe the revolution is upon us. Not a violent revolution, just the realization that we’ve been lied to.

The Rain Demons, Part III

This review is a follow-up to The Rain Demons and The Rain, Demons Part II

Paige McKenzie with Nancy Ohlin, The Sacrifice of Sunshine Girl

Volume Two of this trilogy ended with our protagonist, Sunshine Griffith, literally plunging into Hell. She made the decision to relinquish herself to save all reality, then realized, falling headlong into the abyss, that this false offering would actually make things worse. So the conclusion of the trilogy begins with Sunshine and her mentors battling her way back out again. She escapes Hell, only to find herself trapped in an even worse inferno, High School.

I read the first two volumes of Paige McKenzie’s dark fantasy illuminated by Joseph Campbell, whose heroic journey has permeated our consciousness of storytelling so thoroughly that it’s become instinctive. But I read the third volume just after reading Sady Doyle, which changes my attitudes. Because McKenzie is a woman, writing about an adolescent girl’s adulthood rites, there’s something innately different here, something Campbell, with his Jungian certainties, would never have considered. And it’s terrifying.

At its most basic, this novel completes Sunshine’s transition. She has to accept her human nature, which in this case is superhuman. She literally controls the power of life and death, a decision made for her by birth. But her adulthood rites are colored by forces that preceded her: a father who cannot accept his daughter is growing up, the battle between the true and false mothers, and the ordinary teenage desire to be normal.

Sunshine’s father is a moralistic force looming over her choices. He’s eager to train her in responsibilities necessary to fulfill her supernatural inheritance. But he also repeatedly denies her information necessary to make responsible decisions. It’s never the right time, in his mind. Like fathers throughout history, he desperately wants to preserve her childlike innocence, because in his mind, she’s permanently adolescent, never a grown-up. Even when, in the clinch, she demonstrates her superpowered adulthood.

Campbell divided fathers into good and evil. McKenzie does that instead for mothers. Sunshine has her biological mother, Helena, an angry force of nature that wants to “destroy” the little girl to preserve her adult illusions. Initially this means literally destroying her. Later she metaphorically destroys the child by divulging the information her father isn’t ready to share. Helena is literally queen among her supernatural race, and thus represents the social forces arrayed against adolescence.

Paige McKenzie

Against Helena, Sunshine has her “real” mother, Kat, who actually raised Sunshine. Like Sunshine’s father, Kat sometimes has difficulty with her daughter’s imminent adulthood, but instead of squelching it, she offers guidance. She’s the only parent who never withholds either information of support, though she’s often the parent with the least information to share. Rather than facts, she offers Sunshine courage, permitting her to act, even in the absence of facts, which are painfully rare.

These three parental forces enact, between them, a war to define Sunshine’s adult identity. This conflict unfolds against a more transcendent battle, where forces older than humanity struggle to control Earth’s future. Sunshine’s parents have told her that she’s the child of prophecy, the unique being with power to resolve this battle quickly. Imagine Sunshine’s shock when she meets an impossible boy, one of her own kind, who could take this burden off her completely.

Sady Doyle divides women in horror fiction into three categories: daughters, wives, and mothers. But Doyle reviews women through men’s eyes. Because McKenzie writes, as a young woman, for women, there’s a fourth and category: “best friend” and “mean girl.” The conflicting peer forces influence how Sunshine approaches adulthood. Growing up means, to some extent, conforming; will Sunshine choose conformity from loyalty and encouragement, or fear and humiliation? Sometimes it’s difficult to tell the difference.

This is obviously the conclusion of a trilogy, and the final volume is often a disappointment. Even George Lucas lacked the courage to embrace the bittersweet conclusion he first wrote himself. Audiences who’ve stuck with the trilogy thus far will notice some places where McKenzie flinches from the hurdles she’s set herself (and they’d better stick with the trilogy, because you can’t read these books out of sequence). This novel could’ve been a bit stronger.

But it also completes Sunshine’s character arc thoroughly and with a taut pace. Like anyone’s adulthood rites, Sunshine is immensely powerful, but also shapeless, and must decide whose advice she can trust. Sometimes she chooses wrong; sometimes she chooses right, for the wrong reason. Others pay for her mistakes. But in the clinch, she steps up and embraces her destiny, vanquishing the enemy herself. To our relief, she becomes the adult she needs to be.

What Even Are the Daleks?

The broken, insane Daleks of 2012

In 2008, Davros, creator of the Daleks, announced his newest and most powerful invention, the “Reality Bomb.” He promised, in the Doctor Who episode “Journey’s End,” that he would destroy all matter on the subatomic level using an alignment of planets stolen from time and space. Wow, the Daleks want to destroy all reality! So why, in the 2012 episode “Asylum of the Daleks,” does the Doctor rescue a prisoner from a Dalek POW camp?

Daleks have taken prisoners previously. The 1972 episode “Day of the Daleks” features the Third Doctor, played by Jon Pertwee, visiting the distant future, where Daleks have conquered Earth. To prevent this conquest, the Doctor must break a causal loop. We witness the Daleks’ empire in action, as Ogrons, a slave race, whipping human slaves, while those humans lug metal trash cans full of something, possibly corn kernels, into a factory. Still the machines run.

Thus, Doctor Who provides three models of Dalek industry: the 1972 industrial empire, the 2008 nihilistic destroyer, and the 2012 police state. (Further analysis could yield more models, probably.) What, then, do the Daleks want? To standardize everything into one efficient machine? To destroy everything for love of destruction? To control everything and crush dissent from above? The answer, I suggest, isn’t what the Daleks want; they want nothing.

Rather, what does the audience fear?

“Day of the Daleks” shows the monsters channeling power into factory labor. Conquered peoples exist to work. What they do doesn’t matter, probably not even to themselves: humans are shown wearing rags and surviving on distilled food supplements. The empire feeds, clothes, and houses conquered peoples, but only in mean conditions. They use one slave race to control another slave race, because nothing matters but labor. Humans are moving parts for society’s great industrial machine.

This episode’s other plot involves a 20th Century diplomat preventing World War III. Britain, poised between America and the Soviet Union, would’ve been painfully aware of Cold War machinations. Both capitalism and communism wanted to bring all humanity under their sway. Each industrial economy might manufacture cars and tractors and televisions, but the economy served each country’s larger goal: standardizing humanity into a single socioeconomic system. Both Cold War systems must have looked like Daleks.

The uniform, all-consuming Daleks of 1972

By 2008, as the American-British coalition in Iraq became increasingly unpopular at home, the image of a nihilistic killing machine must’ve felt equally timely. Cold War Daleks wanted to standardize reality; Iraq War Daleks wanted to crush reality beneath their implacable selfishness. Just like coalition forces made nominal efforts to preserve Iraqi oil, these Daleks captured worlds for utilitarian purposes. But eventually, either everything had to burn, or someone had to defeat the war machine.

And by 2012, the economic collapse that loomed behind Russell T. Davies, but which he never directly addressed in Doctor Who, had become overwhelming. Much of the English-speaking world lay in metaphorical ruins, and workers could either hug their chains and live like slaves to the economic machine, or starve. “Nobody escapes the Dalek camps,” the Doctor tells a turncoat. Just like nobody escapes the reality of financial ruin. Life had become a POW camp.

In each case, the Daleks represented what might happen if globalized political forces lumbered on unchecked. Whether the bigwigs saw us underlings as workforce, as a reality needing obliterated, or as occupied territory, the Daleks became the most extreme and self-serving version of that vision. Whatever we collectively fear, the Daleks become the mythological giant adaptation. The Daleks become whatever implacable shared monster threatens our society, stripped of details and turned into a monolithic myth.

“Day of the Daleks” features a scene where a human guard, in Romanesque armor, throws a battered Doctor before his fellow quisling controller. “Have you told him what will happen if he doesn’t cooperate?” the controller asks. “I’ve even given him a free sample,” the guard says, whacking his club against his palm. Which means conquered humans still understand commerce and money. The Daleks control humans, but have left them an economy. Conquest alone matters.

These three stories reflect the Daleks’ infinite adaptability. The horrible monsters always reflect us. We have the power to succumb to Cold War conformity, or resist. We can stand for or against anonymous, amoral world-destroying rapacity. We can accept the prison camp, or die escaping. The Daleks, by their existence, remind us what choices we stand between. And in their faceless, obedient uniformity, they remind us what we’ll eventually become, if we don’t stand fast.

Coronavirus, Christianity, and the Great Stupid Rebellion

Reliquary of St. Cyprian

I remember learning, in Confirmation Class, that Christianity passed from an outcast religion to the spiritual mainstream in the middle Third Century AD. Once oppressed by the Empire, because it preached that power came from somewhere other than Rome’s blessing, Christianity became first acceptable, then widespread; then, by the Fourth Century, it became the Empire’s official state religion. What, we awestruck middle schoolers all wondered, had happened?

The conventional Christian explanation is: Cyprian’s plague. Named for the Carthaginian bishop who left the most detailed accounts, this poorly understood disease wracked the Empire for thirteen years, leaving so many dead that the Empire’s two economic drivers, the military and agriculture, both nearly collapsed. Yet somehow the Empire survived, and Christianity had multitudes of new converts. Supposedly, outsiders were impressed by Christians’ handling of the plague.

When imperial bureaucrats, the aristocracy, and priests of the state religion fled, Christians brought blankets, food, and clean water into the infection zones. They believed (according to the conventional accounts) that, if Jesus touched lepers and menstruating women, two major classes of unclean people in His era, that they shouldn’t fear touching plague patients. Some Christians, according to Cyprian, contracted the disease. But survivors credited Christians with their survival.

This lesson struck me during recent news of how American congregations have handled the COVID-19 outbreak. We’ve heard news of megachurches holding packed services, risking hundreds, even thousands of lives. Though it’s too early to have consistent statistics, regional reports suggest church may be one of America’s largest vectors of infection. People are dying needlessly in the name of God.

In fairness, I probably understand these motivations. These Christians believe their faith will protect them from suffering, and if they become sick they will, as described in Cyprian’s sermons, become ennobled and saintly. Avoiding church, for these Christians, suggests lack of faith in God’s healing principles and the life made new by Christ. They refuse to live in fear; some, I suspect, yearn to become martyrs to the cause.

Yet I think this misses the lessons St. Cyprian taught. Those early Christians didn’t become martyrs because they didn’t fear death; they weren’t holy because they kept attending church. They became holy because they braved the outside world, the exact opposite of what the rich and powerful did. Today, news trickles in that the rich are fleeing us peons, fearing for their lives. Christians have an opportunity to flow in the opposite direction.

Instead, Christians, especially White Christians, are congregating to publicly display their fearlessness, mainly to each other. Like drag racers and amateur daredevils, these would-be modern martyrs mostly seek one another’s approbation and glory. They aren’t rushing into short-staffed hospitals with blankets and clean water, as Cyprian’s Christians did; if anything, they’re denying the reality of the world to receive a stained-glass version of this world’s glory.

I’m reminded of the German Peasants’ Revolt of 1524. Inspired by Luther’s Reformation, German citizens rebelled against the Holy Roman Empire, and also against the Roman church. As in Rome, Germany had a state religion, and church and state conspired to maintain social order, with themselves on top. Citizens demanding government reform, plain-language church services, and “communion in both kinds,” rose up in arms against these twin tyrants of power.

Most important for our purposes, these rebels believed that, having God’s implicit blessing, they were impervious to violence. They believed that swords could not cut them, that bullets (guns were a new and terrifying technology) couldn’t pierce them. To nobody’s surprise, they were wrong. So many peasants died brutally that the Reformation nearly ended, and Martin Luther, then a fugitive from the gallows, risked death to return and quell the uprising.

Today’s megachurch Christians apparently think themselves heirs to St. Cyprian’s noble martyrs, refusing to fear the disease wracking the land. But if their faith doesn’t motivate them to comfort the suffering, while fighting the unjust powers that allowed this disease to fester, they belong to a different class of Christians. They’re closer to Thomas Müntzer’s doomed Radical Reformation. And if they don’t change the path they’re on, they’ll die just as uselessly.

St. Cyprian gives Christians a model to follow. Multiple sources, both Christian and secular, have reminded us recently that Cyprian’s Plague was a massive turning point, for Christianity specifically and Western civilization generally. But Cyprian’s Christians were brave and holy, not foolhardy. When I see megachurch congregations admiring themselves for fearlessness, I don’t see sacred bravery, I see stupidity. Sometimes, God lets the stupid just die.

The Perfect Illusion

I just had my second friend this month announce her cancer diagnosis, and I haven’t figured out how to process this development. It possibly seems small-beer in a social climate where many people are watching friends die in manners reminiscent of the Plague. But knowing two people who will have to fight to preserve their lives, in a medical environment overloaded by sudden, violent contagion, feels personal.

As I write this, America’s COVID-19 numbers are nearly 190,000 cases. That’s an increase of over 100,000 diagnoses since we slipped into Number One for diagnosed cases… five days ago. Yet having two friends diagnosed with cancer feels different. COVID-19 is random, comparable to influenza. But cancer suggests something. Smoking? Radioactive spiders? It isn’t airborne, anyway, so what happened to bring it about?

Knowing my friends have struggles ahead of them, that they have treatments that will sometimes feel worse than the disease, hurts my soul. I’ve struggled, in the weeks and days and hours since learning of my friends’ diagnoses, to understand why this bothers me so. I think I’ve finally come to some kind of conclusion: because despite everything, I’ve managed to maintain my illusions of control. Cancer is the opposite of that.

Much of modern life has cultivated the belief that we control the circumstances of our lives. We need to believe our choices matter in order to participate in a winner-take-all economic system, or the kind of democracy we have in America and Britain. If we didn’t have the mental impression that our decisions matter in our own lives, we couldn’t participate in industrial capitalism or a free-press marketplace of ideas.

We need to believe we have control. Only when our decisions matter, do we actually have power to decide anything. More important, we need to believe our choices matter to maintain the belief that we exist as individuals. If we perceive our options as circumscribed by social conditions, and limited by factors outside our ken, then we become members of a collective, swept along like the tide.

This isn’t necessarily bad; membership in the collective is mandatory for mass movements and social change. The entire underlying principle of labor unions, political parties, and Chambers of Commerce holds that we get more done, and better, when we act collectively. But some people, stripped of the illusion of control, find themselves bobbing along like dead fish. If life is beyond our control, they think, our choices don’t matter.

That certainly happened to me when, in my middle twenties, I surrendered the conservative individualist principles I’d grown up believing. Faced with the realization that, not only did I no longer believe my father’s individualist ideals, but also the ideals of my community, I felt powerless. I believed nothing I did could matter. I held passionate monologues for my college girlfriend about my newfound beliefs, but I didn’t actually do anything useful.

Years later, I’ve passed through that nihilistic phase and recognized the need for action. I participate in civic action, rally with fellow true believers, and lend myself to creating the numbers necessary for long-overdue change. No, I don’t always uphold this necessity, just as I don’t always follow my religious beliefs as I should; but who does? Action is more important than perfection.

Yet, learning my friends have cancer, that they may be beginning a predictable march toward mortality, makes me realize: I’ve moved into another illusion of control. As a conservative, I once believed I could, übermensch-like, control my destiny through brazen will. As a progressive, I substituted belief in community and fellow-feeling. I now realize for the first time, that I’ve replaced one illusion of control for another.

Would things be different if I had the cancer, instead of them? Maybe. I’d have to wrack my soul to find peace with my own mortality. Instead, I find myself stuck outside, watching, helpless. I’m too broke to offer financial support, and too scientifically illiterate to offer medical support. Since one of my friends is agnostic (I haven’t talked religion with the other), my prayers would mainly comfort me.

Having this happen amid the COVID-19 outbreak only underscores my smallness. Reality, let’s admit, isn’t your friend. My belief in God doesn’t influence His existence, or absence, one whit. Our entire social, political, and economic system depends on the expectation that our choices mean something. Cancer, and mortality more generally, rips that expectation away. We’ve couched ourselves inside the perfect illusion; now we face the reality of our own essential insignificance.