Money

So for a third of your useful life, you toil and sweat, suffer work-related stress and injury, save up health problems that’ll eventually kill you for what? It’s not just because you’re a braindead, unwashed cretin. You do it for money.

And what the hell is money? It’s not made of metal, or paper, or magnetically aligned particles on some bank’s hard-drive. Most modern economies use fiat money, that’s not even backed by anything but the conspiracy’s word that a dollar is worth, well, a dollar. You’re chasing something that doesn’t even exist, and calling it a career.

Money is just more conspiracy gunk in the global ideosphere. People trust it because, well, other people trust it. Governments argue and debate, worry and fret over whether to switch to the Euro, or control their own idiotic monetary policies, or peg their currency to the dollar, or whatever. But it’s not the government that’s deciding what people think is worth something. The conspiracy has direct control. If your president said you should pay your bills in Disney-Dollars would the rest of the world take any notice? Would you?

You use all kinds of money, you’ve probably even brought gift tokens, about the most stupid form of money you can possibly imagine, but mostly you’ll be using your nation’s official crap. You do it for the same idiotic, illogical, unthinking reasons you do most of the stupid irrational things you do. Shout it out with me now, because everybody else did. Gah! Is there any other reason you do anything?

Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not saying that money is evil. Even baby Jesus only said the love of money grows into evil. I’m not even saying it’s worthless. It’s one of the safest promises out there. Please, give me some. I’ll take all you can offer.

It is, however, the perfect illustration of the kind of thing the conspiracy does to flaky cretins like you all the time. Money does have value just because everyone thinks it’s valuable. You’re forced to agree that it’s true, just because everybody else says it’s true. The problem with money is when you mistake that socially agreed valueless-value, this meta-value, with real value. When you start to want a big bank balance for the sake of a big bank balance. When you think art is an investment.

A dollar is worth a dollar for the same reasons as a Rembrandt is worth several million of ’em. Coz you can get some sucker to pay it. Neither one of ’em is worth that much to you until you trade it.

You and your barter-partner need to agree on an exchange. So is it gonna be dollars, or pounds, some oligarchy money or will it be cigarettes, or favours, or Monopoly Money. Well. Which is the conspiracy telling you to use?

The governments want you to use their money, because they can tax their money. You can’t tax barter. Imagine asking for the 10% of that pet hamster you swapped for a snake in sales tax? Nobody ever paid 5% on their personal IOUs. But you don’t write IOUs, you can’t, the fuckers in the conspiracy won’t except it! It’s like your government’s word is better than your own! Frankly, you’re so damned unzipped it probably is.

The main thing you think about money, the most insane thing, the the most blatantly imbecilic, moronic, nonsensical thing you think about money is that just a bit more of it will be enough. You’ve already got a bit more for “Bob’s” sake. You’ve been on that treadmill for years and it always leads to the same place.

There’s only one way to get everything that you want in life, and that’s not to want very much, but you’re duped and conned into thinking that what you have isn’t enough. Always. What you really need is a little more slack but the idea is so alien to your conspiracy-riddled thought-bucket it’s practically inconceivable. You can’t buy slack, so what’s it worth?

Money goes down in value every second it’s in your pocket. They call it inflation, like it’s everything else that’s going up in value, not the money coming down. Yet you’re so dippy and deranged you measure your worth in currency, so you have to run just to stand still. There’s no correlation between money and happiness but you still seek one like it’s the other, as if to make yourself more comfortable in your misery.

The conspiracy tells you that Time Is Money, hurrying you with false promises of wealth and fortune, making you sell time to them, trade valuable seconds of your life for some pathetic multiple of the minimum wage. You do it too. You actually trade time for money. Worse yet, you get into debt and trade your future for money. Sure, a mortgage looks good compared to rent, but you’ll be working for the bank forever.

The whole system is so random that indiscriminate “bubbles” form all over, tidal waves of meme-juice flowing across the markets. Sweeping some bubble surfers to riches and dumping the cost on the rest of us when it pops. You buy housing because everyone else might want to buy housing. You’ll make a killing, so long as everyone is as stupid and manipulable as you are.

They are, of course. The most infuriating thing about the conspiracy is that it’s right. According to it’s own logic.

The effects of the conspiracy can sometimes be most transparently seen in the workings of a capitalist economy. These economies aren’t run or controlled by faceless bureaucrats, elected politicians, big companies or even by the banks or gods or aliens. Things make money because you and your idiot nose-chained co-conspirators buy them. The market goes up because everyone thinks it’ll go up. Econoplastic feedback moulds the economy. It’s like a dog chasing its own tail, things shoot up or down in value because everyone expects them to. The economy, it’s currencies, the value of it, it’s all a self-creating mythology that exists only in the conspiracy’s brainwaves. Your vacant, unintelligible, cloned “opinion”.

So pop charts and stock quotes and interest rates and inflation and fashion and international relations all follow the same unthinking auto-animated chaotic chase up and down. Once again: It is true, but only because everybody thinks it is. It’s the conspiracy’s greatest trick, their self-defining truth, and like a puppet on the conspiracy strings, you must but agree, even if it’s crazy and arbitrary and even if it’s wrong.

On To Chapter Seven