Where there's a will, there's a won't

Despite its centrality to their lives, people have difficulty understanding money.  Most seem to think they simply want more. For the truly impoverished this is perfectly right. But beyond a certain point - the yuppie level - the power and meaning of money shifts subtly. 

Money begins to scale.  Twice as much gives you the same real spending power because the value halves.  Similarly the perception threshold of money - the smallest sum which you are aware of as a conscious act of spending - rises in direct proportion to the amount of money you possess.  The widow's mite bites back.

This impotence has occurred throughout history.  Whenever a ruling class attains a critical level of material wealth, it loses the ability to appreciate absolute value.  The commonest response - a consequence of habit - is to seek ever more money in the mistaken belief that there is further threshold beyond which money regains its pristine power.  Hence the limitless rapacity of those already rich beyond most people's conception, and the larger urge to empire.  Ancient Rome, imperial Spain, and Victorian England all maintained its favoured classes in sybaritic luxury.  And in all of them, the result of this superfluity was first ennui, then a gradual slipping into excesses - usually sexual - followed by terminal decline and eclipse.

The most recent manifestation of this recurrent historical process is America.   The high level of material comfort has meant that for many people possession is but a signature on a credit card slip away.  Already the first two stages of ennui and excess have set in.

Americans are bored with the materialism they strive for so obsessively.  The foreign cars, large-screen colour TVs, jacuzzis and personal computers have become the basic starting point not the goal.  As a result, the nation is totally at the mercy of fads and crazes.  However absurd, novelty seems to offer the possibility of new satisfactions, though inevitably transitory ones.  For the same reason, Americans acquire fur-lined cars or inlay diamonds in their teeth.  They are all attempts to widen the boundary of acquisition.  It is the original frontier spirit driven mad by running out of frontiers. 

The group worst affected are the yuppies.  They have been brought up on the credo of wanting equals getting.  They are the conspicuous achievers; but the rose of their success is cankered.  They have not only attained the critical level of wealth where money loses its power and pleasure, they have achieved it young.  They have nowhere to go, and half a century in which to get there.

And so we are beginning to see the ultimate irony of a generation predicated upon desire and its fulfilment lose the ability to want.  Everything has been too easy.  It is like living in a cursed castle where every wish is granted: soon it is too much effort even to wish.  A generation which began as gilded youth has become gelded.  All we can do now is stand back and wait for the messy backlash.

(15.2.87)

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