A bit of business first. I’m not going to show you the diagram, but I have been sent a diagram. The illustrator is going to come up with their own diagram based on what I saw. You should be able to see that above. But this is a little bit ‘telephone’, if you follow. I’m talking about another diagram.
Anyway, here’s what the diagram means:
The world of politics revolves around the lies of money. It always comes back to the same thing. Worlds repeat, along with ideas, and we don’t move forward with lies and money.
The money thing is the heart of the matter. Right in the centre, surrounded by the bruised past of those that lead, and the resigned misery of the present, is a symbol for an imaginary currency. The centre of the circle, the holding pattern, is the imaginary value of growth and riches. The stabilising factor that holds us back.
I mean, I realise I come across as anti money, and this probably seems somewhat absurd. Why do I always hold money as the bad guy, damaging the world, when it’s clearly been driving progress and invention for hundreds of years. It seems a controversial view, and I can understand that. But I just can’t help but feel something wrong at the heart of it.
Money is an imaginary agreement. We assign arbitrary value to a useless (relatively) substance to make trading easier. Years ago, money had value, what you could melt down from it. Metals. Now money has intentionally less value smelted than at its face (though if you have coppers from before 1992 then you can actually extract more worth from than than they are worth, so to speak). The price is set by an infrastructure agreement of incredible complexity, and it is tied to the markets and trading mechanisms that have been making rich people richer for a very long time.
Money is a tool, it makes life easier.
But we don’t use it like that any more. Money has stopped being a process to make trading easier, it has become trading. Money has become the target. For everybody, from every level. Particularly up at the top, where it’s harder to see things that can’t be counted. Politics has become mostly economics, or rather, being a public relations firm for the wealthy. Trying to justify the absurdity of infinite growth, so that we think that the rich getting richer is what we all need.
And it doesn’t matter whose face is at the top of the heap. It doesn’t matter how bright eyed and bushy the opposition is, once it gets in, it becomes the status quo. Even now, our opposition has stopped challenging the big stuff, and focussed on the details.
That’s how arguments are won, but its also how the system never changes.
The circle is complete, and we the people, we the planet, are nowhere to be seen.
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Illustration by Henry
