What Comes After Money by Daniel Pinchbeck

Author:Daniel Pinchbeck [Pinchbeck, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781583943502
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2011-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

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 normal culture it touches.

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