Wealth
Bob Johnson prescribes an antidote to our ‘cash addiction’
Isn’t Quakerism wonderful? But can it solve economic crises and tax blunders too? The political economist and writer Richard Murphy thinks so, and extols our Quaker testimonies of peace, equality, truth and simplicity as being ‘the basis for a good tax system’. What a refreshing and invigorating thought. It does what I delight to do – it deploys Quaker insights into the wider world. Here I want to take it even further, to dig deeper into what wealth really is, and how Quakerism sheds glorious light here too. My concern is that unless something along the following lines does see the light of day, wealth will soon sour us all. And it need not.
What if a way through our forthcoming economic disaster could be found by deploying not only the above testimonies, but also ‘let your life speak’. First off, it’s obvious that ‘let your wealth speak’ is calamitous – though the deeper reason for this is quite subtle. Wealth in cash terms is partly illusory and entirely symbolic – if it weren’t a symbol for something else, it wouldn’t work at all.
Being one hundred per cent symbolic, wealth can delude the wealthy into thinking they have something real, something that makes the people around them matter less. But as Yorkshire farmers say: ‘Money is like muck.’ It’s no good unless it’s spread around. Money only works in communities. If you live in a gated community your finance puts your social and mental health at risk.
Now, Quakerism is especially good at winkling out what matters behind everyday symbols. So, let’s look at cash: what is it for? Well, it’s to buy food rather than having to grow all your own. But that’s only partial. What if you have a surplus of, say, apples, and you give them away? Or you toil long and hard to help people without ever charging a sou? This is doing things for the ‘love of it’ – cash doesn’t help here and can harm. So, we need another ‘symbol’, alongside money.
This is where ‘let your life speak’ comes in, high-lighting ‘life’, which gives us that quintessential Quaker insight. Why not look at values, at wealth, in the whole of life, not just in coinage. Thus, putting my medical hat on, I tweak Charles Darwin and conclude that life is not so much a ‘survival of the fittest’ but just ‘survival’; for, scientifically speaking, we live in an inanimate world beset by ever-increasing entropy, ever-growing disorganisation, which afflicts us shortly after conception and concludes only when we die. It’s a fact of life. ‘Organisms’, like us, battle entropy every microsecond, they ‘organise’, adapt or perish. Evolution mandates this on all living organisms, or else they’re extinct.
So, economics needs to become more humane, not restricting itself to monetary values alone, as it does ad nauseam today, but expanding to include ‘organising’ values, or ‘orgs’ for short. Thus, every act you do socially carries not only a cash value but also an ‘org-value’ – it is when these two diverge too far that the currency’s value shrinks.
We all need food-energy to remain organisms, which gives food both a financial value and an org-value, too. Peace and social stability cannot exist unless individuals organise it, deploying their ‘orgs’. It is time we included ‘joy of doing’ in our annual accounts.
Cash can be deadly – in famines it’s invaluable, and in gluts it’s corrosive. Millionaires make hapless politicians because of it, and markets wilt when oil cheapens. Solar electricity, or ergs, is bringing us superabundance, but unless we urgently humanise the price-mechanism, it will curdle us. I prescribe ‘orgs’, or their equivalent, as an antidote to our cash-addiction.
Let’s start with a citizen’s income (or people’s ‘Quantitative Easing’ – John Maynard Keynes would’ve approved). I see this as a ‘wealth’ task of Quakerism today.
Do you?
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