Monstrous Economic Injustices
December 13, 2023
FROM The Modern Idolatry, Being An Analysis Of Usury and The Pathology of Debt by Jeffrey Mark (Chatto & Windus, 1934):
The present position of the monetary system, which is the beginnings of its complete breakdown, is the living reductio ‘ad absurdum’ of a proposition which first formulated itself in man’s consciousness thousands of years ago, which has since been worked out in human flesh and blood, and which has now reached its illogical conclusion in this century.
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The present monetary mechanism is “obsolete” because it derives from dark and unsuspected throw-backs in the human subconscious. It is only by realizing and admitting that these dark places in the subconscious are part of the traditional pathology of idolatry that we can connect the workings of the present system not only with such visible evidences of destruction and sacrifice as the toleration of unemployment in a society where actual employment constitutes the only claim to independent existence; with the sabotage of plant and commodities and the restriction of production, on a large and increasing scale, side by side with the fact of partial or total destitution for millions throughout civilization; with the imminence of a second international war in a world which dreads it, which cannot “afford” it, and which prays for peace: but also with the desperate sense of frustration, resulting in suicide, mental illness, neurosis, involuntary cynicism and disillusionment, and every variety of psychological perversion or inversion which is the unfortunate inheritance, or developed experience, of every sensitive person who responds to or is brave enough to exercise his creative impulse in life as it is to-day. It is particularly necessary to realize this, because we have so long been the victims of the vagaries, stupidities and the monstrous injustices of the monetary system, that large sections of the population in every country have come to regard even the acutest forms of material and psychological misery as part of the natural order of things.
If man’s material problem on this planet has at last been solved, and this solution—now definitely held out to us by applied science and technological development—is being withheld from us by the barbarous anachronisms of the present monetary system, it is important to realize that the system is not only responsible for the present desperate condition of mankind; but also that, at the same time, it is preventing the transition into an age of leisure and plenty which all impartial thinkers must see to be definitely written into the future. The extent of our loss and suffering is doubled therefore when it is seen that in forcing on us this minus of work-drudgery, starvation and war, the system prevents us from accepting the plus of leisure, peace and plenty which is now definitely within our grasp.
