The God of the Machine - Tranche 37
Chapter XVIII, Excerpt 1 of 3
Why Real Money is Indispensable
In applied mathematics, you must describe your unit. With a gold unit of value, labor hours and material and everything that goes into the whole process can be reckoned by a common measure. They must be reckoned somehow so the prices on the goods will show what can be bought for any given sum in currency. The material used for money must be durable, divisible, incorruptible, portable, not easily imitated and found in nature. There is never enough money in the Society of Status.
What is most astonishing, the enemies of civilization have openly declared their intention to destroy it and how they mean to do so. The threat is cited by J. M. Keynes: “Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, surer means of overturning society than to debauch the currency. The process engages the forces of economic law on the side of destruction.” There is an implicit assumption that seizure of gold does not make any difference. If that is true, why do governments seize gold?
The verbal language of a high civilization is also a precision instrument. When words are used without exact definition, there can be no communication above the primitive level. If those who are supposed to express or influence “public opinion,” writers, economists, and pedagogues think in concepts of savagery, what can be the outcome? To break down the high energy circuit of the Society of Contract, those who are to be destroyed will deliberately carry out the program of ruin.
Why Real Money is Indispensable
In applied mathematics, you must describe your unit. With a gold unit of value, labor hours and material and everything that goes into the whole process can be reckoned by a common measure. They must be reckoned somehow so the prices on the goods will show what can be bought for any given sum in currency. The material used for money must be durable, divisible, incorruptible, portable, not easily imitated and found in nature. There is never enough money in the Society of Status.
What is most astonishing, the enemies of civilization have openly declared their intention to destroy it and how they mean to do so. The threat is cited by J. M. Keynes: “Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, surer means of overturning society than to debauch the currency. The process engages the forces of economic law on the side of destruction.” There is an implicit assumption that seizure of gold does not make any difference. If that is true, why do governments seize gold?
The verbal language of a high civilization is also a precision instrument. When words are used without exact definition, there can be no communication above the primitive level. If those who are supposed to express or influence “public opinion,” writers, economists, and pedagogues think in concepts of savagery, what can be the outcome? To break down the high energy circuit of the Society of Contract, those who are to be destroyed will deliberately carry out the program of ruin.
IP's grasp of the things that are going on today, given that this book is from 1943, is as amazing in it's own way as AS is, from being written in 1957.
Her grasp of things that were logically obvious in 1943, the errors that she sees, that our political class STILL does not understand, is astounding and terrifying. Printing nearly unlimited amounts of fiat currency cannot end well.
Maybe we need a new T-shirt: "God of the Machine - It was ALWAYS non-fiction"
From paragraph two, the forces of economic law on the side of destruction are on the demand side. Think of this when nearly every economic forecaster cites GDP as their metric.
From paragraph three, "pedagogues think in concepts of savagery, what can be the outcome?" It helps to think in the debasement of language as the Return of the Primitive. The same is true of the barnyard ethics of racial identity.