Why We Need Madness
The best horror and science fiction writers capitalize on a feeling we all have from time to time, that of the unknown reality bubbling just below the surface of what we perceive. Often it’s only visible via some key, some secret hiding in plain sight.
I often get that feeling while scanning the headlines about the current financial crisis in the United States. All these words and analyses directed at specific issues, all interconnected but linked in such a way that it is impossible to see the whole. It is very much like the proverbial room full of blind men trying to describe an elephant based on the part they’re examining. It seems that there is something huge standing in the middle of this room, our culture, and we cannot see it for the same reason that we cannot feel our cells dividing moment by moment, or divine the history of the organized stardust through which we compose our thoughts. To paraphrase a certain presidential candidate, we are the thing we seek, and for that reason we cannot see it.
Humanity is not a monolith, obviously. But the intelligence gap between us and our nearest intellectual neighbor here on earth is remarkably large, and we have no other intelligent species with which to compare and contrast ourselves. We are more like each other than we are like members of other species, whether we like it or not. And we are alone in our intelligence, unsure whether that which we advance towards as a society is a natural progression or a colossal mistake. We have only the actions of our ancestors to measure, and of course we are their creations, physically and sociologically. We are where they left off, and they were making it up as they went along.
A while ago I saw a shrink. It’s something that I think every single human being ought to do, particularly if you honestly don’t think you’re crazy. My shrink had a relatively easy job with me, because apparently I was acutely aware of all the things wrong with me. I addressed all of these things as they came into my head, and upon saying them out loud in a linear fashion, they made perfect sense, and were not actually that crazy.
Towards the end of our first session, she made an observation that should be obvious to anyone who’s ever owned even a mildly intelligent dog. The more cognitive ability you have, the more your brain requires challenge and purpose. In the absence of that challenge and purpose, your brain begins to talk to itself. And something that talks primarily to itself for an extended period of time is bound to start chasing its own tail, barking loudly, and going a bit crazy.
Humankind has been talking to itself for many years now. Each of us possesses more cognitive ability than any other non-human being on the planet, and yet the majority of us find ourselves required to spend that mental power on basic issues of survival. We know that there is more to life than existence, and we seek our own ways to uncover it. Thus we have developed religion, philosophy, science, mathematics, art, music, language, things that on the surface do not appear to be biological requirements for survival. And yet these things persist even in the harshest environments, under the gravest of threats to life and limb.
We seek more than that which stands plain before us. Where there is simplicity, we look deeper, finding the complexity hidden within. Sometimes this impulse is driven by personal gain, and sometimes it has no attributable origin. We are a curious species.
As we have developed over centuries, over millennia, we have created a vast catalog of internal references, spanning languages and cultures. We speak to each other about love, courage, fear, intelligence, stupidity, hate, insanity, assuming the other person knows what we mean by these terms. They address only the human experience, for it is all that we can reasonably be aware of. What does courage mean to an elephant? Or love? We have no real data, only guesses.
And in truth, most of what we know about humanity is guesswork. Individual experiences vary widely, and each piece of information will of course be examined by a human being, with a unique perception and cultural references of their own. The human condition is a quantum state, its true nature altered by the act of measuring. As I am studied by a therapist, so do I change my perception of myself, and thus does my behavior shift in response.
What does any of this have to do with the financial markets? Absolutely everything.
Economics is one of the world’s oldest sciences. Cost/benefit analyses began in the earliest human tribes, whose members measured the value of one thing against another, with an eye toward receiving maximum benefit for minimum inconvenience. Tools, hunting methods, agriculture, metalworking, architecture, all of these things result from centuries of the human drive to streamline, to maximize the chances of survival against the forces of nature.
All along this road, there have been those who have pulled off to one side, to try and gauge just what it is that we are building here. They, too, were driven by this inner scrutinizing eye, seeking the working parts behind the machine. While their neighbors leveled their gaze at bettering the mechanisms of human survival, these lonely few sought to get at the root of the longing, to understand why mastering the devices of mortal prosperity was somehow not enough, why we still wanted more.
Tribalism enters into the equation, certainly. To have enough is good, but if your neighbor has more, the mind almost involuntarily seeks to know why. And when they who have more seek to take the little that you have, then survival against the dumb elements of nature is not enough. Survival against the human elements–greed, domination, envy–becomes paramount.
To that end, humans invented money.
Money is a variety of things. As a weapon, it works very much like artillery. The more you have and the better you can aim it, the more formidable you become against your foes. As a tool, it is the ultimate Swiss army knife. It can become anything: A house, a car, a meal, a sexual favor, even another human being to do your bidding. As an invention, money makes fire and the wheel look like tinkertoys. An old man in a wheelchair may seem to be a pitiable thing, but with enough money in his pocket, he is as deadly as the fittest assassin.
But like other tools, money does not operate independently of humanity. And its strength grows in direct proportion to the sharpness of the mind that wields it.
Humanity has long moved past the stage where brute strength alone confers status. This may seem counterintuitive as we witness the imposition of imperial will by force, but a closer look reveals that the strength held by the world’s most powerful armies is one borne of technological and scientific innovation, not muscle mass. The deadliest weapon yet conceived by man came not from the mind of a warrior, but from the introspection of mild-mannered scientists, killing millions with pencil and paper.
In the years since the advent of mutually assured destruction, human minds bent on conquest have had to turn their focus away from military pursuits. Money is the 21st century’s weapon of choice, and the best and brightest of the postwar generations have clustered to high finance like moths to flame. Wall Street firms employ physicists, statisticians, probability theorists, each group a financial Manhattan Project, in search of a secret key to ensure domination for their tribe, those who put their money towards a chance to create more.
But as discussed earlier, money is not a single thing. Money is what we say it is. A person can say that a house has money in it, which we call equity. An individual can hold a share of stock, a noncorporeal concept that nonetheless has a monetary measure. People can invest in an idea, a “future,” representing a certain amount of money.
And to a degree, these values are objectively provable. If someone will buy a house for a set amount, that house is obviously “worth” that sum. If a share of stock can be sold for an agreed price, that is the “value” of the share. Orthodox capitalists may mock Burning Man types for currencies based on found objects in the desert, but using their own logic of “value,” it is a functional system.
In this state of affairs, with money being a purely psychological entity, it was only a matter of time before people started playing games with it. In the past fifty years, it is as if financial institutions have been playing an increasingly gigantic game of psychological chicken with each other and the public at large. Complex instrument begets complex instrument, which entwine to create yet more complexity. And once these are set in motion, new complexities arise to capitalize on the complexity of the ever-expanding definition of the “market.” The wider the net, the more numerous the loopholes, and the more threads woven through to create ever larger nets. Understanding the structure is now even beyond those who helped create it.
It is madness.
There is no other explanation. We have created a world of shadows, of self-fulfilling prophecies and circular logic, where every assertion is balanced upon another, bills of sale carbon copied a hundredfold, pies cut into mathematically impossible proportions, lies which cannot stand but for the lies which came before. We have created the ultimate self-referential universe, and it bears no resemblance to the world which it inhabits. We know only that we are here, and that it was well under construction when we arrived, giving us the choice either to get on or be trampled under its gears.
The economic society in which we live is both of us and beyond us. There may be no conceivable way to stop its momentum, to truly stop and take an accurate gauge of what constitutes value. And like our atomic demon children, mishandling it may unleash our doom.
Humanity is prone to mass hallucination. A man claimed godhood for himself, and it was so. Priests said the sun was Apollo in his chariot, and it was so. Clergymen spoke of demons inhabiting parishioners, and it was so. The color of a man’s skin was said to remove his rights as an independent human being, and it was so.
And yet, outlasting all of this, there was money. And in an age when humans turn themselves further inward, daunted by the swarming mass of humanity, when our fates are cast by faceless organizations, when what we consume is increasingly beyond our ability to manufacture ourselves, money becomes the very air we breathe.
But what is money? We are money. It is a creation of our collective intelligence. Without us, it does not exist, and it controls our behavior as surely as our brain pumps our heart. We cannot escape it because it is us. It is what a species that has talked to itself for millennia has created.
To unplug, to seek a life free of the collective, certainly it is feasible to try. But there is nothing not monetized. Land, from which comes food, and on which goes shelter, is also money. Taxes are levied on its owner, a fee for the privilege of residency on a monetary asset. A life free of land promises no better. Food, water, shelter, all are money.
I am not an anarchist, nor am I particularly libertarian. I am as much a creature of this society as anyone else. I desire more than my body requires, I envy those whose lives I deem more prosperous. I dream of living lives that exist nowhere beyond a film screen or printed page.
But I am under no illusions. The life we lead in this society resembles madness for the simple reason that it is madness. There is no difference between the two. Enough people speaking a thing and making it so, there can be no other description than mass delusion. My life, my livelihood, my future and that of my child, are built on the solidity of that illusion. If it cracks, we will simply patch it, put on a fresh coat of paint, and build a bridge to an adjacent structure, newly invented to confuse ourselves into prosperity. We cannot for a second admit, all of us at once, that it is a lie. To do so is ruin. And therein lies the greatest madness of all.