Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011) Read Free Page B

reflect no reality but on the contrary simply refer to other numbers, why, I ask, do we have to accept the verdict that we are now poorer and must start behaving as if we are poorer? Why not, I ask, simply throw away this particular set of numbers, numbers that make us unhappy and don’t reflect a reality anyway, and make up new numbers for ourselves, perhaps numbers that show us to be richer than we used to be, though it might be better to make up numbers that show us exactly as we are, with our well-stocked larders and our tight roofs and our hinterland full of productive factories and farms?
    The response I receive to this proposal (this “naive” proposal) is a pitying head shake. The numbers that confront us, the numbers we have inherited, I am told, do indeed describe the way things are; the internal logic in the progression of those numbers from higher to lower, from early 2008 to late 2008, describes a real impoverishment that has taken place.
    So we have a standoff. On the one hand, people like myself who don’t believe anything real has taken place and demand ostensive proof that it has. On the other hand, those in the know, whose line is: “You plainly don’t understand how the system works.”
    In Book 7 of The Republic Plato asks us to imagine a society in which people spend their waking hours sitting in rows inside a dark cave, staring at screens on which various flickerings are taking place. None of them have ever been outside the cave, none of them are acquainted with anything beyond the flickerings on their screens. All accept without question that what they see on the screens is all there is to see.
    One day one of these people happens to get up and stagger outdoors. His eyes, unused to the light, are blinded, but he does catch glimpses of trees, flowers, and a multiplicity of other forms that do not in the slightest resemble the flickerings he is used to.
    Shielding his eyes, he returns to his fellows. This place where we live is actually a cave, he says, and the cave has an outside, and outside the cave it is quite different from inside. There is real life going on out there.
    His fellows snigger. You poor fool, they say, don’t you recognize a dream when you see one? This is what is real (they gesture toward the screens).
    It is all there in Plato (427–348 BCE ), down to the details of the hunched shoulders, the flickering screens, and the myopia.
All the best,
John
    P.S.: I am not unaware that in proposing that we make up a new, “good” set of numbers to take the place of the old, “bad” numbers and install these new numbers in all the world’s computers, I am proposing no less than the discarding of the old, bad economic system and its replacement by a new, good one—in other words, the inauguration of universal economic justice. This is a project which our present leaders have neither the aptitude nor the will nor indeed the desire to carry out.

December 9, 2008
    Dear John,
    Your “Letter to P. A.” has turned up in Siri’s computer, and she has just printed it out for me. I don’t know when it was written or sent, and if I am days or weeks late in answering, please forgive me.
    Before addressing Plato’s cave and the utter collapse of civilization as we know it, I want to tell you and Dorothy what an immense pleasure it was spending those days in Portugal with you. The sun, the conversations, the meals, the unhurried pace of things—all memorable. Yes, we had to sit through some dreadful films, but the chance to see one brilliant film was adequate compensation for our suffering.
    LETTER TO J. C.
    What we are talking about here, I think, is the power of fiction to affect reality, and the supreme fiction of our world is money. What is money but worthless pieces of paper? If that paper has acquired value, it is only because large numbers of people have chosen to give it value. The system runs on faith. Not truth or reality, but collective belief.
    The numbers you refer to are born