Chapter 17

The Bigger Picture

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. 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 woke up! Whenever that might be. The dream was taking forever. And was hardly satisfying. As to its purpose or meaning – why I was dreaming this particular 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 happening that would 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 distraction – something light and undemanding, but able to capture my attention. Deciding to see what Ernest had available in his collection, I used the TV remote to (eventually) list his files on screen – music and video. I felt more in the mood for music, but scanned both categories, in case a suitable concert video was present. However, apart from classical composers, 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, wearing 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 behind the mask of so-called democracy and its inadequate options of misrepresented party devotees capable of running their 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 all are not kept busy, existential angst and/or boredom runs riot, tearing 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 to arrange everyone’s needs and desires. 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, 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 incantations 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 in the exporting countries. 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 food that Dianne had used. I’d probably heard everything I was hearing before at some stage, I just could not remember when.

“But,” continued Ernest, “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 or relaxed, interest rates hiked or dropped, taxes raised or cut, 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 dropped as the policies bit. And so, everyone raced faster just to stay still, while breathlessly awaited economic indicators degenerated, 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 CAPEto absorb an amount estimated to cover the costs of all repairs expected 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. Once established which work lacked workers, a call for volunteers was made, 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 DYI 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 at fifty-five, 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, redistributing 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 earlier, 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 compensated for by adjustments prompted by local 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, Turkey five, and Zambia one. Australian goods were sold to Zambia for one-ninth their cost, and to Turkey for five-ninths, while Zambia bought Turkish goods at one-fifth their cost. How they actually did this was another shock to my system: to buy a ninety-dollar Australian product, for example, Zambia debited its CAPE-trade account by ten dollars in favour of Australia, which credited itself with the remaining discounted eighty 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 said.

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.

However, I did not muse on this for long, as I was distracted by a paragraph in a book published the 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?!