14 The dictionary calls money ‘a medium of exchange’. I call it the human answer to the inhuman hazard that dominates existence. Genius, intellect, health, wisdom, strength of will and body, good looks – all these are prizes we draw in the lottery that takes place before our birth. Money is the makeshift human lottery that half compensates those who were unsuccessful in the first cosmic lottery. But money is a poor lottery, since the prizes won in the first prenatal lottery constitute a handsome free issue of tickets for the next.
If you are lucky in the first you are more likely to be lucky in the second.
15 The poor tolerate wealth in this order; most, wealth acquired after birth by pure luck; next, wealth fairly earned according to the current system; least of all, wealth acquired at birth, inherited wealth.
16 The supreme hazard is that I am who I am. The child of a Texan multi-millionaire, or of a Central African pygmy. Gamblers though we are, it sticks in our throats that this hazard is so pure and the apparent penalties and rewards are so enormously separate. But so effective in making the harsh reality tolerable is the analogy of the lottery that even the unfairest rewards and privileges will be countersupported. I believe the analogy is an evil one and all belief in it fundamentally ignoble. We behave like gamblers who make a virtue of accepting bad luck. We say, Only one horse can win. It’s all in the luck of the game. Someone must lose. But these are descriptions, not prescriptions. We are not only gamblers, we are the horses they gamble on. Unlike real race-horses, we are not equally well treated, whether we win or lose. And we are not horses at all, since we can think, compare and communicate.
17 We are fellow members of the human race; not rivals in it. We are given intelligence and freedom to counteract and control the effects of the hazard that underlies all existence; not to justify injustice by them.
THE MONETIZATION OF PLEASURE
18 Once man believed he could make his own pleasures; now he believes he must pay for them. As if flowers no longer grew in fields and gardens; but only in florists’ shops.
19 Capitalist societies require a maximum opportunity for spending; both for inherent economic reasons and because the chief pleasure of the majority lies in spending. To facilitate this pleasure, hire-purchase systems are developed; the various forms of lottery fascinate the would-be rich as the brightly fit booths of a travelling fair once fascinated the country peasant. All those symptoms classed under consumer neurosis appear; but there is a far worse effect than all these.
20 This is the monetization of pleasure; the inability to conceive of pleasure except as being in some way connected with getting and spending. The invisible patina on an object is now its value, not its true intrinsic beauty. An experience is now something that has to be possessed as an object bought can be possessed; and even other human beings, husbands, wives, mistresses, lovers, children, friends, come to be possessed or unpossessed objects associated with values derived more from the world of money than from the world of humanity.
21 It is the possessor who is always the possessed. Our mania for collecting not only objects worth money but experiences that have cost money and our regarding of such a thesaurus of experiences as evidence of a valid existence (just as misers characteristically regard their hoarding as a virtue) finally make us poor in all but the economic sense. We seem to ourselves to live in exile from all we cannot afford. The pleasures that cost nothing come to seem worth nothing. Once we took our good deeds to heaven; now we take our purchases and our expense accounts as heaven.
22 The shoddy-goods economy: workers must be paid to produce more and buy more. Much must be consumed and if much must be consumed, goods must be designed to last for as short a time as the guillible public will tolerate. The community craftsman disappears; he commits the archcrime of making lasting goods. Exit humans and creators, enter mechanics and machines. The mechanics want mechanical pleasures, of course; not human and creative ones.
23 The corollary vogue among the intelligentsia and bourgeoisie is for the antique; for the handmade, the solid, the distinctive, the durable; for the ‘craft’ shop, for goods made in countries too poor to afford machine production.
24 Entertainment at a low cost and everywhere cripples man’s powers of self-pleasing. The mechanical receiver turns man into a mechanical receiver. We object to battery hens; but we are turning ourselves into battery humans.
25 In a town with too many men, prostitution becomes inevitable. Every pleasure experience becomes prostituted or prostitutable. The moneyed workers, those emancipated by social progress from proletariathood, lose all confidence in their own ability to amuse themselves and in their own taste. The price they pay for having money to spend is the surrender of their old working-class freedom in cultural matters to the skilled technological opinion-molders employed by commerce. Their labour is no longer exploited; but their minds are.
26 The aim of commerce has always been to market every pleasure possible and to sell it to as many as possible. The producer and the retailer are neutral, they claim no morality; they simply satisfy the public desire. But what we are being increasingly offered by commerce is not the pleasure, but a reproduction of it. Not the skylark singing in the hayfields, but a skylark in a record player; not a Renoir but a printed ‘replica’; not the play in the theatre, but a ‘television version’ of it; not the real soup, but an ‘instant’ powder; not the Bermudas, but a documentary film of them.
27 It is the technical problems, not a lack of potential consumer demand, that stop us from having cans of tropical sunset, tubes of warm Pacific breezes, and packets of ‘easy-mix’ sexual pleasure. We are able to reproduce almost anything audible or visible; already someone has invented a jukebox for smells; and only Aldous Huxley’s ‘feelies’ still seem completely out of our reach.*
28 The reasons for this demand that secondhand or imitation experience should be made as available as possible are obvious. Life has never seemed so short, but rich; and death so absolute. And if social and economic circumstances put many direct pleasures out of reach of the majority then they will naturally and reasonably take what substitute for the real thing they can get.
29 This monetization of pleasure is a makeshift means to get us through a period of history when the majority will not be able to have direct access to the things they want. As more and more realize what full being means and that their societies made it impossible for them to give this full being reality, the marketing of reproduction and imitation sources of pleasure – substitutes for the real sources of pleasure – becomes more and more important.
30 We talk of consumer goods and consumer services* but these are in fact placebos society has increasingly to offer its members as they become aware that then-real wants are largely caused by corrigible inadequacies of the social, political, international or human situation. In this field, all controllers of the dispensers of the placebos, that is, the governors, are in the same predicament, however far apart they may seem politically.
THE AUTOMATION VACUUM
31 Now a terrifying, because violently aggravating, new factor has appeared in this situation. It is cybernetics, the already advanced technique of controlling machines by other machines.
32 Man is about to be deprived of a great pole – work routine. The nightmare of the capitalist society is unemployment; the nightmare of the cybernetic society will be employment.
33 There have been absurd suggestions: that the disemployed masses must be forced to take part in compulsory games; that we shall have to undertake vast tasks, like the digging of canals and the moving of mountains, by primitive hand means; that the great majority must be sterilized. These proposals are ridiculous; but the potential quantity and intensity of frustration in a cybernetic society is terrifying.
34 There is surely only one acceptable solution. The energy poured into the old work routine must be poured into new ‘routines’ of education, both learning and teaching, and enjoyment. Working for money, in order to be able to spend and enjoy, must become working for knowledge and the power to enjoy through knowledge.
35 Evolution is about to go over on to a new tack. A reorientation of purpose; a reacclimatization of man.
