I woke in
the same couch, a blanket spread across me, Yvette nowhere in sight.
The
intervening time was a black hole—an absence of memory. Events leading to the
kiss, clear as day.
I sat up…
stunned to discover a clear head, no hint of giddiness, and no hangover. Not
even bad breath! Yvette was right about her drink.
I still
wore the clothes of the night before. Though baffled, I was compelled to think
no further about it because of a bursting bladder. I had drunk a lot.
I returned
from the toilet to find a note on the table: “Dear ‘Steven’, You really know
how to show a girl a good time. Don’t know much about fairy tales though. One
kiss and Prince Anti-Charming falls into
an impenetrable sleep—and at barely eight o’clock! God knows I tried to wake
you. I’ve got lectures throughout the day. Hope we can resume where you left off—that is, unless Ernest
suddenly returns. I’ll call when I get back. Love, Yvette.”
It suddenly
occurred to me that since waking in Wilbur’s room, I had not spent one of the
three ensuing nights in a bed. What would Freud have said about that, I
wondered.
The clock
in the kitchen indicated I’d slept for over twelve hours. An intrusive
nuisance, this habit of suddenly falling asleep. But at least it would not last—not
once I really woke up! Whenever that might be. Unfortunately, contrary to my
own wishes, the dream seemed to be in no rush to come to a conclusion.
As to its
purpose or meaning—why I was dreaming this particular less than satisfying dream,
and in so much detail—I still could not begin to guess. What was my
subconscious trying to tell me? That at almost forty I had become truly old?
Too conservative perhaps? The ideologies and approaches of my time were not
appropriate for the future? Was that why it was so foreign? Why then was it so
hard to understand? Or accept? Despite my considerable but not always
successful efforts to figure out how
it worked, for the most part I still could not believe that it could work. But I was intrigued by it.
Increasingly so.
Alone in
Yvette’s house, free of the hangover I should have had, I eventually realised
it was the day of the hospital tests. Today, I would finally prove to everyone
who I was. But eleven o’clock, when Wilbur was due to pick me up, was almost
three hours away, and I was at a loose end. I half expected some new and
undoubtedly puzzling event to overtake me, or an unremittingly ordinary occurrence
to reveal peculiar or outrageous new habits or systems of organisation and
procedure, but instead… nothing happened. I sat and thought for minutes,
utterly undisturbed—except for a growing sense of restlessness.
Eventually,
I could stand it no longer. If my dream was not going to bring me something of
interest, I would have to look for it. First to practicalities: I needed a
shower, a change of clothes, and breakfast, so I returned to Ernest’s and went
through the motions.
During
breakfast, partly in response to the traumatic effects of having to select a
new shirt (finally opting for a very pale green one littered with white and pale
yellow geometric shapes), I decided I needed a distraction—something light and undemanding,
but able to capture my attention.
I found the
TV remote and used it to list Ernest’s collection on screen—his music files as
well as videos. I felt more in the mood for music, but scanned both categories,
in case a suitable concert video was present. Apart from classical composers, however,
there was not a familiar musician’s name among them. Admittedly, I wasn’t
exactly up-to-date with modern music—my tastes clung vigorously to those I
acquired during my teens—but I wouldn’t mind betting no band had ever called
itself ‘Juan Nytstan and the Itchy Foreskins’. Likewise, album titles were rarely
as long as ‘Now I’ve seen you naked, I could never eat turkey’. Or ‘It’s not
Holst but it sounds like something from Uranus’. O my aching subconscious!
An untypically
short title caught my attention: ‘Surviving Capitalism’. More surprising was
that its listed ‘artist’ was none other than Ernest himself. Probably not a
concert, I decided. Unless it was industrial music. Or a modern opera—maybe
with a chorus of ‘Money, money, toil and trouble’.
Curiosity
got the better of me, even when the video’s menu showed it to consist of a
collection of speeches made by Ernest. Hardly what I was looking for, but I was
intrigued. Would it show me delivering a speech I never gave? I could not
resist.
When the
first images hit the screen, sure enough, there I was—Ernest at least—standing
on a podium, delivering a speech. No hint of nervousness. Barely referring to a
thick wad of notes. Clothes like a feverish drug-soaked dream of a renegade
hippie: frills, beads, blurred and bleeding colours, and a collar resembling
nothing I’d seen outside old rock concerts or the Vatican.
Had to be a
dream. Or a computer forgery.
“Well into
the twenty-first century,” Ernest began, “humanity’s mindset remained straight
out of the middle ages. Except that instead of lives constrained by religious
dogma, they were suffocated by economic and political orthodoxies that
worshipped god the profit, the job, and the holy growth. Overseen not by popes
and bishops, kings and dukes, but less conspicuous rulers, with different
titles, who wore not priestly nor regal robes but business suits. A world
dominated by mutually masturbating coalitions of political and economic forces
that constantly shifted and realigned as they overtly and covertly tussled for
control, hiding always behind the mask of so-called democracy and its
inadequate options of misrepresented party devotees capable of running society
only into the ground.”
This was
certainly not me, even if it looked like me. I would never have even thought
such things, let alone said them. Nor was I ever as flamboyant as Ernest was
with hand gestures, which accompanied his speech almost without pause.
“In my
opinion,” he continued, holding a stern pedagogic finger in the air, “the key
to their rule was a deep-seated fear that people with time on their hands are
dangerous—that if everyone is not kept busy, existential angst and/or boredom would
run riot, and tear down society. So, everyone had to work. Or search for it. Even though technology and knowledge
had increased to the point decades before that there was no longer any
necessity to work as hard as most did. The work performed was not necessarily
of any real benefit either. Rather, the sacred outdated economic dogma dictated
that it merely had to allow someone somewhere the chance to make a financial profit.
And so, the glut of manic activity subjugated societal and ecological goals, all
the while mistaking the map for the territory, and the ends for the means. Money
itself became the goal, yet it was the Tinkerbell of the economic world, a
figment of the collective imagination ready to disappear as soon as belief
wavered. And belief was sorely tested as financial wizardry ruled. Banks gained
their princely tithe of compound interest using pens as magic wands, waving them
over formal documents during ceremonies that created credit out of thin air.
With official sleight-of-hand, Reserve Banks magically created money merely by
purchasing pieces of paper inscribed by governments. The loaves-and-fishes
banking system lent money many times greater in amount than the savings left
with it by depositors. Issuers of bonds, stocks, derivatives, and various other
too-clever-by-half exercises in self-deception—glorified IOUs and bets upon
gambles—conjured up cash flows with almost as much ease as they lost them.”
“Which part
of my subconscious is this coming from?” I said aloud. There were days when I
felt down and bored with my job, but they were uncommon, and I’d have thought
never so extreme as to have these sorts of feelings behind them, however deeply
buried.
But Ernest
wasn’t finished: “And so, deafened by the hallucinatory sound of money talking,
people pursued profits and cash flows—not the satisfaction of needs. Work that
most needed doing was often not done: Mercedes were built for the Mercedes-less
rather than homes for the homeless. Children languished because of parents’
double-income stress. Lives wasted away from workaholism or alternate addictive
states sought for escape from nine-to-five humdrum.”
Monday-nity ’til Friday, I thought. A phrase one of the
junior tellers at my branch frequently used—especially on Monday mornings.
“Corporate
power games,” continued Ernest, “and promotional struggles sold out friendship,
self-respect, and individuality. Relentless economic competition transformed ‘I
was just doing my job’ into a universal excuse for collective idiocy—even
bestowing clear consciences to exporters of hi-tech weaponry and torture
equipment banned from use in the exporting countries. The result: despite
material success, or perhaps because of it, the real and imagined pressures of
the sacred rat race provided not a human community so much as a busy buzzing
beehive where individual concerns were mostly treated as less important than
the continued functioning of the hive, a monolith whose purpose remained
obscure to most of its members. And what did the leaders of the time do, the
political and business powerbrokers? They defended their privileges while making
outdated-ideology-driven decisions that were usually inappropriate, often made
matters worse, and always shut the barn door long after the horse had not just
bolted but caught the next flight to South America. Armed to the teeth with
senile fantasies of orthodox explanations provided by myopic economic experts
rigidly facing yesterday, they confounded common-sense with their wishful
thinking and reality-tunnel-vision. However bad it looked, their advice was the
same: to continue with habits of the past, to go boldly—unthinkingly—where
everyone had gone before. The bottom line: continue to compete and grow.
Without competitive growth, the market couldn’t have enough money to afford
investing in environmental protection and restoration or social improvement.
So, first things second, if not last. Can’t afford to save the world but can
afford to destroy it.”
I started
when I heard this—it was something Yvette had said more than once. Then I
realised: of course my subconscious would cobble it all together from many
sources, including my wife; just as it had for her expression about home-grown food
that Dianne had used. I’d probably heard everything I was hearing before at
some stage, I just couldn’t remember when.
“As a
result,” continued Ernest, “and because growth was—is—impossible to maintain indefinitely, the hapless citizens of the
day were periodically confronted by televised warnings from dour-faced
exponents of the status quo. Gorged on orthodoxy, muttering so much economic
jargonspeak as to suggest the native tongue had been forgotten, masquerading
authority with a title like Treasurer, Chancellor of the Exchequer, or Minister
of Finance—and desperate to invoke confidence in that authority—the
‘democratically’ elected political representative, convinced that the signs had
been read correctly, would convey to the public (with great gravity) the sad
sobering ‘truth’.”
Ernest’s
next words had a harsher, higher-pitched, more nasal twang and a pronounced
Australian accent. He slipped in and out of this voice to suit the speech.
“‘The
economy’s stuffed’, screamed the economic minister from the press-room pulpit.
‘It’s over-heated, unbalanced, impaled on a J-curve, crushed under debt,
infected by foreign problems, congested, brittle, strangled, suffocated, castrated
and crippled; but above all, it’s no
longer competitive. We aren’t winning anymore. Time to pull the finger out,
tighten our belts, make the extra effort…’, and perform all those other clichés
that might more accurately be rendered: ‘The gods of the economy have been
angered and we must offer them a sacrifice’. With a seal of approval from the
most fashionable economists, credit might be tightened, interest rates hiked,
taxes raised, government services reduced, or some other bitter policy pill
popped… ‘for the national interest… to regain our competitive edge… so living
standards can rise.’ Yet living standards usually fell as the policies bit. And
so, everyone raced faster just to stay still, even as breathlessly awaited
economic indicators degenerated further, cancelling promises of imminent
prosperity, and eroding faith in the holy prophecies of economic priests. Even
the market could only bear so much bull.”
I started
fast-forwarding the speech—more memorable than many stiff epics I’d endured at
conferences, but not what I was after… nor were the later excerpts I glimpsed.
Before long, I gave up on it altogether.
Its
castigation of the present though had resurrected my interest in understanding
this dream future. What I’d seen so far was clearly intended to avoid the
pitfalls alleged by Ernest, but still I felt like I was missing the bigger
picture. I certainly hadn’t found the flaw I presumed must be buried somewhere,
the chink in the armour that would reveal the true deception. I suddenly
realised I hadn’t finished reading A Free
Lunch. Nor had I looked at any of the other sources of information Wilbur
suggested three evenings before. Now, with nothing more pressing, and no
obvious alternatives, it seemed the time to do so.
For two
hours, I skimmed A Free Lunch and
several other books, looking for salient parts. It took me much less time than
I expected to gain the overview I sought. It all meshed together in a way I had
not previously understood.
At its
basis, enufism (or freelunchism, as it was sometimes called) depended on the
determination of requirements—public and private. This was not done by faceless
bureaucrats or party apparatchiks. And certainly not by profit-obsessed CEOs
and marketing managers. There was no real corporate or central planning.
Rather, plurocracy provided a quasi-market surrogate. Each locality established
for itself what it wanted. Most localities usually overestimated, but this
allowed for strife and changes of mind—even disaster. Insurance, for example,
was no longer in the form I knew; instead, each year, prices were set via CAPE to absorb an amount estimated to cover
the costs of all repairs likely to be required because of natural disasters and
misfortune, a figure based on recent trends, and usually more than what was actually
needed.
Realising
that not everything in life can be planned, each person also individually
nominated an additional percentage of their total anticipated expenditures to
be devoted to discretionary ‘impulsive’ purchases—items they did not expect to
buy but might if the mood took them (additional sweets, a trinket, an extra
children’s toy). This increased both production and the working week, across-the-board,
but, with the effect obvious to all, there was a clear motivation to keep the
percentages fairly small.
What each
locality wanted, of course, varied considerably, and reflected priorities
appropriate to circumstance and culture. Hence, earthquake-prone areas put a
lot of effort into reinforcing buildings. Older countries placed equal emphasis
on preserving and restoring historical structures and art-treasures. Many
places still required a lot of work to repair and rejuvenate degraded
environments. Whereas Australia usually chose to spend more time and energy per
citizen on sport and recreational facilities than anywhere else.
Whatever
the requirements, as they were determined—with specialist co-ordination and
advice as needed, especially regarding the latest innovations and newly
invented products—they were fed plurocratically into the Net, by consumer and
producer alike, then tallied and tabulated at successively higher levels, from
locality to nation. Near the end of the year, they were set in place for the
following year. With costs so determined, prices were reset using CAPE. Then it
was ‘simply’ a matter of doing all the work thus plurocratically deemed to be
worth doing.
The way
this was done was very alien to me. In a nutshell, people shared the work,
co-operated together to get it done. Like the Net, each local node merged
itself into a bigger network, distributing work across more people, each with
something to offer. Needs, talents, and dispositions played the dominant roles
in determining how the sharing took
place.
But even
this co-operative economy could not avoid people being required to take on an
equal albeit small share of work that none or too few wanted
to do. It didn’t amount to much, usually just a short spell or two each
year, rarely more than two or three weeks at a time. But some chose,
when it was possible, to do a lot of
the unpopular work in quick succession so as to free themselves from it
for a
while thereafter. Remembering Ernest’s roster, I realised he had taken
this
option: by devoting all of his
needays for the current year to menial work, he could then look forward to
concentrating entirely on his historical research for many years after.
In keeping
with the fundamentally cooperative nature of the system, the way in which
unwanted work was shared was anything but draconian. After establishing which
work lacked workers, a call for volunteers was made, thus allowing people to
choose what they saw as the least odious of the unwanted work. But of course
there was still some work for which none or too few volunteered. This had to be
assigned—by computer, randomised within the constraints of not forcing people
to work further from home than was reasonable or practical, or to perform
labour for which they were patently unsuited (like abattoir work for
vegetarians). Even so, the end result was not fixed in concrete: the work to be
done by each city was recorded on the Net in such a way that the person to do
the work could indicate it as something they were willing—or eager—to swap or
give up to others more interested.
Apparently,
quite a few assigned jobs swapped. One motivation for doing so was to save
personal expenses by building one’s own goods out of working hours, paying just
for parts not labour. This could be planned for with CAPE, or taken into
account retrospectively. Thus, a frugal audiophile, for example, was often more
inclined than others to suffer the tedium of a few seven-hour working weeks
manually assembling relatively expensive hi fi speakers because this gave them
the requisite skills to DIY their own discounted set.
Not
everyone worked a seven-hour week as it turned out. Some worked longer hours—those
required to be on call or whose work could not easily be performed in a single
day per week or which needed skills that too few people had. An economy might
have so few doctors for example that each needed to work say five days a week,
until more could be trained to ease their burden and allow them to return to
standard hours—but then their extra initial contributions would be compensated
for by subsequent reduced hours and/or earlier retirements (which otherwise
occurred, if desired, at sixty) when
they started receiving a ‘citizen’s wage’ of half the average income.
Similarly, anyone who wanted to take time off could work longer hours
(preferably) beforehand, if they could find the work. This, I realised, must
have been what Alice referred to when I was in her restaurant: apparently, she
had worked almost enough ‘overtime’ to take an entire year off.
All of this
complicated CAPE, of course, but did not undermine it. Computer resources and
plurocratic organisation constantly monitored arrangements and redistributed
resources towards appropriate training as necessary to ease the burden on
people working longer than standard hours in jobs lacking sufficiently skilled
people—the aim was always for a standard working week for all as soon as
possible.
In the process
of obtaining this overview, I also learned just what Wilbur meant when he
informed me that banks and banking (essentially) no longer existed. A few of
their functions were carried on via CAPE and the Net, but most had disappeared
entirely. There was no lending, no mortgages, no compound interest, barely even
any cash to be stored in vaults. The whole payment system was computerised,
except for a few plurocracies who insisted on retaining the use of cash either
because of their relative isolation or their 666-inspired distrust of a
cash-free system (or both). Even what I would have called a person’s ‘bank
account’ was just called their ‘account’. It was simply another facet of CAPE,
stored on computer somewhere in the labyrinth of the Net, updated by each Babel-deducted
expenditure and each periodic crediting of income.
As for
wages, as Wilbur had mentioned, they could be altered but only when there was
plurocratic agreement that they didn’t accurately reflect the value to the
community of the work being paid for. After apparently considerable adjustments
in earlier years, they soon became more or less static. And with essentially
fixed wage rates, it became possible to adopt a fixed-value currency (and, not
surprisingly, to abandon currency markets)—a ‘labour standard’. One Australian
dollar was defined as the total payment for one minute of carpentry, forty
seconds of medical care, one minute and twenty seconds of farming, and varying
amounts of time at many other jobs. Definitions differed from one nation to the
next, but an average of all national standards—a global ‘composite-job’—determined
international exchange rates. With Australia paying four of its dollars for ten
minutes of the composite-job, and the USA three of its dollars for the same
amount of work, the Australian dollar was worth three-quarters of a USA dollar.
And had been for almost twenty years.
This would
have made an international currency easy to arrange, except there was no need
for one. There was still plenty of international trade, despite increased local
production, but rather than a choice between polar opposites—free trade or protectionism, globalisation or local self-sufficiency—balance was
the goal. Although all nations tried to be as self-reliant as possible, there
were still certain goods and services that some nations found much easier to
produce than others (still no mangos from Alaska for instance). So there were
still exports and imports. But they were handled via simple balance sheets, not
by exchanging hard currencies.
Each nation
had either a debt or credit with any other. The aim, to suit CAPE, was for
total costs of export production for any nation to balance its total costs of
imports. But there were inevitable imbalances, which prompted altered working
hours—longer to increase exports, shorter to decrease them. Increases to the
working week, however, were often small enough to be overturned by subsequent productivity
improvements. Only if a national surplus or deficit was large, and remained so
for long enough, would there be a potential problem. Allegedly, this never
happened, because of discounted exporting from richer to poorer countries of
technology and other methods for producing goods.
Dianne had
referred to this when I thought she said ‘pair giving’. In fact what she meant
was ‘PARE
giving’—Poor And Rich
Exchange. When it was first introduced, some measure of relative wealth
had
been determined so that, for example, Australia rated nine out of ten,
Mexico six, and Liberia three. Australian goods were sold to Liberia
for three-ninths their
cost, and to Mexico for six-ninths, while Liberia bought Mexican goods
at three-sixths their cost. How they actually did this was another
shock to my
system: to buy a ninety-dollar Australian product, for example, Liberia
debited
its CAPE-trade account by thirty dollars in favour of Australia, which
credited
itself with the remaining discounted sixty dollars.
“And Ernest
accused bankers in my time of money magic,” I exclaimed when I read this.
Creative accountancy indeed. Its justification, went the claim, was the
pressing need to end poverty and international tensions. Allegedly, it worked:
there were no refugees from enufist countries, it was claimed.
Yet it was
such an obvious piece of deliberate self-deception, how could anyone have
accepted it, let alone entire nations with diverse cultures?
The more I
studied, however, the more I realised that what could have allowed this and
other free lunch innovations to work was the same thing that had allowed money
to function over the millennia. My university degree included a unit on the
history of money, and one of its major lessons was that money can only be
traded for goods if there exists a common acceptance of what is ultimately an
utterly artificial definition of the money’s ‘value’. Whatever its standard,
money acts as a social convention or agreement, dependent on stability of belief. Presumably the same
could have been true for PARE and the
rest of enufism: if people had grown
convinced firstly of its usefulness, then of its necessity, it could have
become part of the social fabric, woven tightly enough not to be at risk of
immediate unravelling. But for the life of me, I could not envisage what might
have prompted such conviction and agreement.
I did not
muse on this for long, however, as I was distracted by a paragraph in a book
published a year after A Free Lunch:
“Latest population projections suggest there will be about nine billion people
alive when ecological and economic crises may well hit their peak. These people
will face a return to barbarism if we continue to compete economically. We
simply must change our economic system before then. If we do, it will be a case
of a switch in time saving nine billion. The obvious objection to PARE stems from a desire not to think
beyond our current tunnel-reality. It is a poor objection, a lazy one. And
given how work-obsessed this business civilisation is, lazy objections seem
especially inappropriate. The task before us is to re-channel the energies we
now put into jobs and careers instead into making a better world, and better
people. A quote from Aldous Huxley seems germane: ‘They intoxicate themselves
with work so they won’t see how they really are’.”
I had to
read that a second time. It sounded eerily familiar. Where had I heard it
before? And then I remembered: it was the quote on my desk calendar, the last
time I was at work. I remembered thinking at the time that Huxley was probably
intoxicated himself when he wrote it—with mescaline!
But perhaps
I was the one who was intoxicated.
There was
no mistake, I was sure. It was the same quote, this time cited in a book
allegedly published two years later. Coincidence? My subconscious incorporating
a real event into an endless dream? It had to be. Or…
Was it
possible that I really was Ernest? Stricken with amnesia? Incorporating a
presumably well known quote into a fantasy of an imaginary character called
Steven? Was my wife also an invention, based on the Yvette I was with the
previous night? Was everything I thought I remembered a fabrication, figments
of an over-active imagination?
Was
everything I knew wrong?!
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Chapter 18![]() |