3 Having, not being, governs our time.
WEALTH AND POVERTY
4 The trial of money as the-unique source of happiness has begun, in the richer countries of the West; it will fail. Wealth in itself is innocent. The rich man in himself is innocent. But wealth and rich men surrounded by poverty and poor men are guilty.
5 This tension, between the poles of poverty and wealth, is one of the most potent in our societies. It is so potent that many poor would rather remain poor with the chance of becoming rich than be neither poor nor rich with no chance of change.
6 Nothing differentiates more than wealth; nothing similarizes more than poverty. That is why we all want to be rich. We want to be different. Only money can buy both security and the variety we need. The dishonourable pursuit of money thus becomes also the honourable pursuit of both variety and security.
7 Money is potentiality; is control of, and access to, hazard; is freedom to choose; is power. The rich once thought they could buy their way into heaven; now heaven has moved to the here and now. But the rich man has not changed; and his belief that he can still buy his way into heaven-on-earth seems proved.
8 Both rich and poor countersupport the present disparity in the distribution of wealth. The more a political system equalizes the distribution of wealth, then the more popular become the ways of avoiding such equality.
9 Just as poor individuals countersupport rich individuals, so do poor countries countersupport the difference in wealth of the countries of the world. America and the West European countries are hated, but envied: and copied. A poor country is a rich one that is not rich.
10 Lotteries, football pools, bingo games and the rest are the chief protection of the modern rich against the furies of the modern poor. One hangs from the lamp-post the person one hates; not the person one wants to be.
11 We want money to buy those things that a good society would provide for nothing. That is, knowledge, understanding and experiencing; reading about the ends of the world and going to the ends of the world; not going through life not understanding most of what one sees, and therefore not seeing most of what one looks at. The terrible thing about poverty is less that it starves than that it stagnates as it starves.
12 Riches buy variety. That is the great law of capitalist societies. The only way to escape psychological frustration in them is to become rich. All the other exits are blocked.
13 It does not necessarily require any of the nobler human qualities to make money. So the making of money is a kind of equalizer. It becomes natural that a man should be judged by what he can get – money; and not by what he could never in any circumstances get if he was not born with it.
14 The dictionary calls money ‘a medium of exchange’. I call it the human answer to the inhuman hazard that dominates existence. Genius, intellect, health, wisdom, strength of will and body, good looks – all these are prizes we draw in the lottery that takes place before our birth. Money is the makeshift human lottery that half compensates those who were unsuccessful in the first cosmic lottery. But money is a poor lottery, since the prizes won in the first prenatal lottery constitute a handsome free issue of tickets for the next.
If you are lucky in the first you are more likely to be lucky in the second.
15 The poor tolerate wealth in this order; most, wealth acquired after birth by pure luck; next, wealth fairly earned according to the current system; least of all, wealth acquired at birth, inherited wealth.
16 The supreme hazard is that I am who I am. The child of a Texan multi-millionaire, or of a Central African pygmy. Gamblers though we are, it sticks in our throats that this hazard is so pure and the apparent penalties and rewards are so enormously separate. But so effective in making the harsh reality tolerable is the analogy of the lottery that even the unfairest rewards and privileges will be countersupported. I believe the analogy is an evil one and all belief in it fundamentally ignoble. We behave like gamblers who make a virtue of accepting bad luck. We say, Only one horse can win. It’s all in the luck of the game. Someone must lose. But these are descriptions, not prescriptions. We are not only gamblers, we are the horses they gamble on. Unlike real race-horses, we are not equally well treated, whether we win or lose. And we are not horses at all, since we can think, compare and communicate.
17 We are fellow members of the human race; not rivals in it. We are given intelligence and freedom to counteract and control the effects of the hazard that underlies all existence; not to justify injustice by them.
THE MONETIZATION OF PLEASURE
18 Once man believed he could make his own pleasures; now he believes he must pay for them. As if flowers no longer grew in fields and gardens; but only in florists’ shops.
19 Capitalist societies require a maximum opportunity for spending; both for inherent economic reasons and because the chief pleasure of the majority lies in spending. To facilitate this pleasure, hire-purchase systems are developed; the various forms of lottery fascinate the would-be rich as the brightly fit booths of a travelling fair once fascinated the country peasant. All those symptoms classed under consumer neurosis appear; but there is a far worse effect than all these.
20 This is the monetization of pleasure; the inability to conceive of pleasure except as being in some way connected with getting and spending. The invisible patina on an object is now its value, not its true intrinsic beauty. An experience is now something that has to be possessed as an object bought can be possessed; and even other human beings, husbands, wives, mistresses, lovers, children, friends, come to be possessed or unpossessed objects associated with values derived more from the world of money than from the world of humanity.
21 It is the possessor who is always the possessed. Our mania for collecting not only objects worth money but experiences that have cost money and our regarding of such a thesaurus of experiences as evidence of a valid existence (just as misers characteristically regard their hoarding as a virtue) finally make us poor in all but the economic sense. We seem to ourselves to live in exile from all we cannot afford. The pleasures that cost nothing come to seem worth nothing. Once we took our good deeds to heaven; now we take our purchases and our expense accounts as heaven.
22 The shoddy-goods economy: workers must be paid to produce more and buy more. Much must be consumed and if much must be consumed, goods must be designed to last for as short a time as the guillible public will tolerate. The community craftsman disappears; he commits the archcrime of making lasting goods. Exit humans and creators, enter mechanics and machines. The mechanics want mechanical pleasures, of course; not human and creative ones.
23 The corollary vogue among the intelligentsia and bourgeoisie is for the antique; for the handmade, the solid, the distinctive, the durable; for the ‘craft’ shop, for goods made in countries too poor to afford machine production.
24 Entertainment at a low cost and everywhere cripples man’s powers of self-pleasing. The mechanical receiver turns man into a mechanical receiver. We object to battery hens; but we are turning ourselves into battery humans.
25 In a town with too many men, prostitution becomes inevitable. Every pleasure experience becomes prostituted or prostitutable. The moneyed workers, those emancipated by social progress from proletariathood, lose all confidence in their own ability to amuse themselves and in their own taste. The price they pay for having money to spend is the surrender of their old working-class freedom in cultural matters to the skilled technological opinion-molders employed by commerce. Their labour is no longer exploited; but their minds are.