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Is Money Black Magic?

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Is Money Black Magic? IS MONEY BLACK MAGIC? A street hoarding asks, “IS YOUR MONEY WORKING FOR YOU?” (it’s a huge bank ad). In spray-paint below Is written, “No, mate, it works For you fucking sods.” Is money black magic? “Behavioral Economics” Suggests that it is. Their experiments Show that one glimpse of money Can cast evil spells. In an experiment, A screen-saver is set up Showing dollar bills. On seeing banknotes, Floating hypnotically Across some water. The subjects are primed: They behave more selfishly: It’s subliminal, It’s like black magic: They’ve only to see money To become selfish. In the experiment’s Next stage someone walks past them. Spilling some pencils. Those who saw the screen With all the dollar bills on Are slower to help. They’re more reluctant To pick up any pencils. They pick up fewer Than those who’ve not seen it - Not seen pictures of money. ‘Pick them up yourself!’ - They’re tempted to think. Their unconscious reaction is, ‘I’ve seen some money! I’m close to success! I’m a potential millionaire! I’m not spending time Helping idiots! Why should I co-operate? I’m too important!’ - Whereas others Are free from this inhibition And pick up pencils: The unexposed ones Are effortlessly helpful Expecting no thanks, Which is healthier - People doing things without Expecting reward. If just seeing cash Can freeze the instinct to help, Neurologically, Then money is mad; It’s psychotic black magic, Which it’s sick to want. It seems rich people Lie and cheat more than others, A survey reveals. Which shows there’s a curse Which takes its toll on the rich, Changing their nature. But if they should want To have this foul curse lifted The poor can help them. Heathcote Williams (Reprinted courtesy of International Times) … not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini – which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively – but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us … The art of living counter to all forms of fascism, whether already present or impending, carries with it a certain number of essential principles which I would summarize as follows if I were to make this great book into a manual or guide to everyday life: Free political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia. Develop action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization. Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna) which Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic. Do not think that one has to be sad to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into forms of representation) that possess revolutionary force. Do not use thought to ground a political practice in Truth; nor political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. Use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action. Do not demand of politics that it restore ‘rights’ of the individual, as philosophy defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is needed is to ‘de-individualize’ by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchisized individuals, but a constant generation of de-individualization. Do not become enamored of power. “Charging interest to ‘foreigners’ was acceptable. In this way, the Jews justified taking interest from Gentiles, and Christians charged interest to ‘Saracens’ (as Arabs and, by extension, Muslims in general were called in the CAPITALISM Middle Ages).” Handbook of Islamic Banking, M. Kabir Hassan & Mervyn K. Lewis (eds.) 2007, p65 “Seest thou a man active in his calling, he shall stand before kings.” “The Church of England has always been prone to the Proverbs, chapter 22, verse 29, (older English Bible philosophy of ‘if you can’t beat them join them’. They translations have “business”) officially redefined usury to fit in with normal business practice.” Banking, the root cause of the injustices of our time, A. Orr & A. Clarke (eds.), 2009, p39 “Remember, that time is money … Remember that credit is money … Remember, that money is the prolific, generating nature. Money can beget money, and its offspring can beget more, and so on … The most trifling actions that affect a man’s credit are to be regarded. The sound of your hammer at five in the morning, or eight at night, heard by a creditor, makes him easy six months longer; but if he sees you at a “ … keep an exact account for some time both of your billiard table, or hears your voice at a tavern, when you expenses and your income.” “All revolutions are declared to be natural and should be at work, he sends for his money the next day; inevitable, once they are successful, and capitalism, demands it, before he can receive it, in a lump.” The Works of Benjamin Franklin, 1836, vol. 2, p87 as the type of economic system prevailing in Western Europe and America, is clothed today with the Taken from “Necessary Hints to Those That Would “Nine times the space that measures day and night unquestioned respectability of the triumphant fact. But Be Rich” (1736) and “Advice to a Young Tradesman” To mortal men, he, with his horrible crew, in its youth it was a pretender, and it was only after (1748), The Works of Benjamin Franklin, 1836, vol. 2, Lay vanquished, rowling in the fiery gulf, centuries of struggle that its title was established.” p80 and p87 Confounded, though immortal.” From R.H. Tawney’s preface to The Protestant Ethic and Paradise Lost, John Milton, 1667, book 1 the “Spirit” of Capitalism, Max Weber, 1930 “Those who swallow riba [usury, interest] cannot rise up “Philosophy which once seemed obsolete, lives on save as he ariseth whom the devil hath prostrated by because the moment to realise it was missed.” (his) touch. That is because they say: Trade is just like riba: whereas Allah permitteth trading and forbiddeth Negative Dialectics, Theodore Adorno, 1966, p3 riba. He unto whom admonition from his Lord cometh, and (he) refraineth (in obedience thereto), he shall keep (the profits of) that which is past, and his affair henceforth is with Allah. As for him who returneth (to “Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother; usury of riba) such are rightful owners of the Fire. They will money, usury of victuals, usury of anything that is lent abide therein.” upon usury. Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury; The Holy Quran (II: 275-276) but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury.” (Deuteronomy 23: 19-20) “… the Christ rose before him, formidable, on a rude cross of barky wood, the arm an untrimmed branch bending like a bow under the weight of the body. “The absence of a dynamic market economy in many This branch seemed about to spring back and mercifully hurl afar from our cruel, sinful world the suffering Islamic societies has encouraged the inference that flesh held to earth by the enormous spike piercing the feet. Dislocated, almost ripped out of their sockets, the values of Islam are not compatible with capitalism. the arms of the Christ seemed trammelled by the knotty cords of the straining muscles. The laboured However, an examination of the biography and tendons of the armpits seemed ready to snap. The fingers, wide apart, were contorted in an arrested gesture commercial record of Islam’s founder, the Prophet in which were supplication and reproach but also benediction. The trembling thighs were greasy with Mohammed, refutes this presumption. Mohamed Ibn sweat. The ribs were like staves, or like the bars of a cage, the flesh swollen, blue, mottled with flea-bites, Abdullah was a scion of an elite dynasty of religious, specked as with pin-pricks by spines broken off from the rods of the scourging and now festering beneath civic and commercial leaders in Mecca. He abandoned the skin where they had penetrated. his successful business career in Mecca and fled to Medina at the age of 52, where he realised his vision of Purulence was at hand. The fluvial wound in the side dripped thickly, inundating the thigh with blood that an Islamic society. In Medina Mohammed implemented was like congealing mulberry juice. Milky pus, which yet was somewhat reddish, something like the colour policies for competition, consumer protection and of grey Moselle, oozed from the chest and ran down over the abdomen and the loin cloth. The knees had market regulation. Mohammed’s approach to fair been forced together and the rotulae touched, but the lower legs were held wide apart, though the feet trading explains his ban on usury, as distinct from a were placed one on top of the other. These, beginning to putrefy, were turning green beneath a river of proscription on borrowing. Mohammed’s achievements blood. Spongy and blistered, they were horrible, the flesh tumefied, swollen over the head of the spike, and as an economist and market reformer earn him a place the gripping toes, with the horny blue nails, contradicted the imploring gesture of the hands, turning that in the history of economic thought.” benediction into a curse; and as the hands pointed heavenward, so the feet seemed to cling to earth, to that ochre ground, ferruginous like the purple soil of Thuringia.
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