The Man Who Quit Money (22 page)

Unlike most modern monetary critics, Griffin begins by addressing the question: what is money? Since its earliest inception, he tells us, money has been a medium of exchange. The barter system, of course, predates money: a poultry farmer might trade a dozen chickens to a grain farmer for a bushel of wheat. As villages became larger and trade more complex, the direct trading of commodities became impractical: try stuffing a dozen chickens in your wallet. So materials such as beads and seashells were used as tokens of barter—money. In the American colonies, tobacco leaves were used as currency: they were durable, lightweight, and easy to transport. Best yet, to avoid losses in an inflationary market, one could merely stop spending and start smoking.

The most permanent of these commodity monies was precious metals. Gold and silver and copper had the advantage of being rare (to ensure the market would not be flooded), nonperishable, and easy to transport, weigh, and divide. The use of metal money lasted for centuries with relative success—and ended only recently. The system’s demise, however, began almost at its inception. Once a man amassed more gold than he could safely store at home, he sought a secure vault. For a small fee, he stored his wealth in the warehouse of the goldsmith. When he made his deposit, the proprietor issued a receipt that stated
Pay to the Bearer on Demand
. And thus paper money was born. People soon learned that the
paper receipts were equal to their stated worth in gold, and indeed could be redeemed at the vault for gold itself. So it became safe to exchange the currency for goods and services while the gold sat safely in a warehouse.

And here’s where the problem started. The goldsmiths realized that they were sitting on a fortune in unused gold. As long as the paper receipts were trusted as money, people rarely redeemed them for gold. By lending out his customers’ gold—and charging interest—the clever goldsmith could make additional profit. Hence the ascent of the modern bank. Now let’s say the blacksmith deposits one hundred gold dollars, and receives one hundred paper dollars as his receipt. The banker turns around and lends those hundred gold coins to the farmer who, not wanting to lug around a sack of heavy metal, immediately redeposits the coins in exchange for one hundred paper dollars. Suddenly there are twice as many paper dollars as gold coins. If the farmer and the blacksmith arrive at the bank at the same moment demanding coin, they will find only one hundred gold dollars for their two hundred vouchers. By artificially doubling the supply of paper money, the banker has halved its value. The blacksmith and the farmer must now redeem their paper dollars for fifty cents each. Multiply this scenario by a thousand, or a million, and we have a run on the banks. (Also, even though the farmer has lost fifty dollars because of the banker’s scheme, he must still pay the banker interest on the full one hundred that he borrowed. The banker tends to win either way.)

This system, in which paper money is worth only a fraction of its stated value in gold or silver, was employed in the United States into the twentieth century. Then Congress created the Federal Reserve, authorized it to print billions of dollars of currency
that was not directly bound to gold or silver or any other real commodity. It’s a mind-boggling concept, but what it boils down to, says Griffin, is a grand counterfeiting racket. When the economy is stagnant, the Fed simply prints currency and lends it (with interest) to the United States Treasury, which distributes the loot to county and state road departments, to military contractors, and of course, as interest payments to the banks and investors that lent them money the last time around. Hence the national debt. American dollars are not redeemable for actual wealth like, say, the gold bars in the Fort Knox Bullion Depository; they are merely IOUs from the Treasury to the Fed. If Congress needs a trillion dollars, the Fed waves its magic wand and the money appears. There is no need to consult the voters or raise their taxes. Suddenly the money exists, and another trillion dollars is marked in a ledger, added to the national debt.

“What we think is money is but a grand illusion,” concludes Griffin. “The reality is debt.” In fact, “if everyone paid back all that was borrowed,
there would be no money left in existence
.”

William Greider, political reporter for
The Nation
and
Rolling Stone,
critiques the Fed from the opposite side of the political spectrum in his book
The Secrets of the Temple,
and reaches a similar conclusion: “Above all, money was a function of faith. It required an implicit and universal social consent that was indeed mysterious. To create money and use it, each one must believe and everyone must believe. Only then did worthless pieces of paper take on value.”

As our money shifts from metals to currency to credit cards and online transactions, the illusion becomes even more pronounced. “When money is no longer represented even by paper, it becomes a pure abstraction, numbers filed somewhere in the
memory of a distant computer,” writes Greider. “In the computer it cannot be seen by anyone, neither its owner nor the bank clerk who does the accounting.”

Faith notwithstanding, why do we continue to accept these counterfeit dollars, even as their value is decimated by inflation? Because it’s the law. The government has mandated that this funny money be legal tender for all debts public and private. It is a
crime
to not accept it. Imagine how you’d be laughed out of the HR office if you demanded your salary not by cash, check, or direct deposit, but in gold bullion. Our type of money, intrinsically valueless but mandated by law as legal tender, is called fiat money, and according to Griffin is the first fissure in the dike of civilization: “The chain of events begins with fiat money created by a central bank, which leads to government debt, which causes inflation, which destroys the economy, which impoverishes the people, which provides an excuse for increasing government power, which is an on-going process culminating in totalitarianism.”

Or as Greider puts it: “When a society lost faith in money, it was implicitly losing faith in itself.”

.  .  .

D
ESPITE HIS LIBERAL
politics, Suelo was among those captivated by
The Creature
. “Griffin’s book is popular with conservatives, having conservative ideas (that sometimes rub me the wrong way),” Suelo explains. “That’s a shame, because it keeps progressives from unearthing its gems. Griffin’s book was the final straw that broke the camel’s back, convincing me I must go moneyless.” His conclusions echo those of the activists blockading the Seattle streets. He agrees that banking is a racket, a criticism that dates to biblical times. The Old Testament condemns usury—the
lending of money at interest—and when Jesus discovered moneylenders doing business in the temple, he famously upturned their tables and drove them off, saying, “It is written, My house shall be called a house of prayer: but ye make it a den of robbers.” Americans accustomed to paying interest on credit cards and mortgages may be astonished to learn that usury was once considered so pernicious that it was banned by the Catholic Church for more than twelve centuries. William Greider writes that medieval usurers, “though they might be wealthy merchants and prominent in Church affairs, were excommunicated and refused burial in Christian ground, condemned with robbers, prostitutes, and heretics…The moral offense was profit without work. The usurer sold time, which belonged only to God.” While collecting interest has been accepted in the United States for centuries, the charging of ruinously high rates was prohibited in most states by usury laws that capped them at around 10 percent. Those laws were overturned by the U.S. Congress in 1980—one of the many deregulatory factors that contributed to the top-heavy boom of the following decades.

“If banks went out of business, most world poverty would end,” Suelo says. “I really feel that. The way that the system is set up, it causes the goods to flow from the workers to the nonworkers, poor to the rich. That’s just the nature of interest banking.”

But Suelo’s opposition to money goes deeper than believing that usury is a scam. Money, he concludes, agreeing with Griffin and Greider, is but a figment of our imagination—an agreed-upon fairy tale. Which wouldn’t be harmful, except that so many people accept it as real. “Money, therefore, contains a continuous illusion of immortal power—the psychic vehicle for defeating time itself by controlling the future,” writes Greider.
“No one can be absolutely certain of living beyond the grave, but they know their money will.”

This is where Suelo’s lifelong debate about the nature of time dovetails with his opposition to money. Just as his fundamentalist parents believed that the tragedy of linear time—our certain deaths—could be thwarted by belief in the Millennium, so do capitalists believe that we can create fortunes that will live forever, through the miracle of compound interest. But because he questions their shared premise, that time travels in a straight line, Suelo rejects both remedies.

“I don’t see money as evil or good: how can illusion be evil or good?” he writes. “But I don’t see heroin or meth as evil or good, either. Which is more addictive & debilitating, money or meth? Attachment to illusion makes you illusion, makes you not real. Attachment to illusion is called idolatry, called addiction.”

Suelo takes his critique a step further. He believes that money is not the disease, just a symptom. Money is merely the most convenient means of keeping track of the much deeper, and timeless, human inclination toward credit and debt.

As Suelo sees it, through his readings of the holy texts as well as the philosophies of Tolstoy, Thoreau, and Gandhi, “All these separate, distant Scriptures and authors agree: the way of truth is the way of nonpossession.” Poverty is my pride, says Mohammed. Let us live happily, then, though we call nothing our own, says the Buddha. If you want to be perfect, teaches Jesus, go, sell what you have and give to the poor. As Suelo interprets this: “Basically, the greatest sage is at the very bottom of the social scale—a bum.” An enlightened man has freed himself from both debt and credit.

If the prophets agree that truth lies in having nothing, how
did a world of professedly religious people stray so far, into a society controlled by banks and interest, credit and debt? “Poverty was once considered a Christian virtue for it was meant to indicate a lack of concern for the values of this world and a concentration on the life to come,” writes Vine Deloria in
God Is Red
. “In the centuries after the Protestant Reformation, poverty was considered indicative of sloth and other sins, and it was seen as proof of the individual’s degeneracy…As the white populace of Christian America has become more affluent, the concept of stewardship has been developed to explain the embarrassingly rapid growth of wealth of a substantial number of peoples. The theory goes that we are not really greedy, God has simply blessed us by giving us wealth over which we are to exercise good stewardship.”

In Suelo’s mind, the problem is far more ancient than the Fed or the WTO or even the invention of currency. Our reliance on money is akin to Original Sin, or the hubris of Prometheus stealing fire from the gods. “Notice how predators and prey have no sense of vengeance, no pay back. Payment and Debt belong to the Universe, not to individuals. (‘Vengeance [Pay-Back] is mine,’ says the Lord). Yet we humans have stolen payment and debt from the gods. We cannot freely give or freely receive anything. We live under constant obligation.”

It is not this way with any other species. As Suelo learned by living in wilderness, in nature there is no barter. When a grizzly bear gathers raspberries, it doesn’t owe anything to the raspberry bush. When a raven picks at the carcass of a deer, it is not indebted to that dead animal, or to its species, or to the predator or automobile that killed the deer in the first place. Similarly, when a bee pollinates a flower, it does not expect payment. In
Suelo’s mind, nature operates on a “gift economy”: animals freely take what is available and freely give what they have.

This view is problematic to a culture that values work. Humans tend to admire predators like eagles, lions, and bears—we place them as symbols on flags and currency—partly for their power and majesty, but also because they “work” for their meals. We also admire industrious creatures like honeybees and beavers. But you won’t see a coyote or vulture or barnacle on a silver dollar. These creatures are scavengers, parasites. They don’t give anything back, they don’t “work,” and therefore by human standards they are lesser beings.

But it gets Suelo to thinking. It’s true, the coyote doesn’t stockpile carrion for hard times, but neither does he share it with others. He certainly doesn’t tithe a portion of his monthly prey to the starving coyotes in Mexico, nor to his famished jackal cousins in Africa. Yet he manages to survive. And he plays as critical a role in nature as the supposedly noble predators. Aren’t humans merely projecting their own obsession with work onto the animal kingdom, where, in fact, such a hierarchy of worth doesn’t exist?

“All this work, work, work and obligation we think is so righteous is really evil, destructive,” Suelo concludes. “The more I read the Sermon on the Mount, the more I see it is instructions for releasing ourselves from the Money System—the System of Debt & Obligation.”

.  .  .

S
UELO’S SUMMER LIVING
off the land in Alaska in 1997 was his first glimpse that moneylessness was possible. And his trip back to the Lower 48 provided further support. By the time he and
Ander parted ways, Suelo was down to fifty dollars in cash. Attempting as always to test a hypothesis, he set off hitchhiking, wondering if he could make it all the way home on such limited funds. He thumbed his way across the Yukon, through British Columbia, then inland to the Oregon desert to visit Tim Wojtusik. Once again, people amazed him with their generosity: rides, meals, invitations to stay in their homes. And when he finally arrived home in Moab, he counted his cash.

Forty-five dollars.

In two weeks of traveling he’d spent only five bucks. He inventoried what he’d bought. Candy bars. A few cups of coffee. Things that he could have just as easily done without. And suddenly his far-fetched theory seemed an actual possibility.