The idea of doing work simply to make money shows an extraordinary lack of realism. There are lots of people playing the stock market to make money, and they don’t give a damn what the businesses they’re investing in are actually doing. They may be destroying rivers, raping the countryside, getting rid of whole tribes of whales. But they’re in it for the money. And what is characteristic of people who are simply in it for the money is that, when they get the money, they don’t know what to do with it. That’s what really bothers me.
There is a doctrine in the Jewish religion that, when God created Adam, he put into him a spirit which is called the yetzer hara, and that means the “wayward spirit,” or what I call the element of irreducible rascality. And that is in us all—a little bit; it’s not the whole of us. It’s like just a pinch of salt in the stew, and you don’t want the whole stew to be salt. But you have to have just a touch of rascality to be human. And I find it difficult to get along with people who don’t know that they have it. People who come on that they’re all sincere, all good, all pure, bore me to death and scare me.
If I do business with someone who is not really aware that he’s a rascal, I know he is impossible to do business with. He’ll suddenly cheat me completely. But if I’m aware that he’s a bit of a shyster, I feel comfortable and I let him know that I am, too. Then we’re human. Then we can let our hair down. Then we can say, “Look, let’s work this out. This is what I want, and I know what you want, and if we can get that clear, we can work out a reasonable agreement.” We can compromise. We have a little play of give and take. But if you don’t have that, you’re absolutely snarled.
If a corporation is to be a true organism as distinct from an organization, it must be based on the principle of mutual trust, and not on law. Because if you can’t trust other people, you cannot have a community—not even a corporation.
True, we all need money—simply because we’ve all agreed that we all need money. There’s no other reason. It’s important to understand this about money; a lot of people don’t know it. Money is a measure of wealth. Money is not wealth. Money is like inches—dollars, let’s say, are like inches: they are a way of measuring real wealth, which consists of material resources plus energy plus intelligence. That’s wealth. Money represents it. We used to have the idea, you see, that gold was money. Gold is wealth. Well, that’s perfectly absurd. Because does the prosperity of the world constantly depend on discovering new gold mines? When a banker buys gold, what does he pay for it with? Book entries. And so (with this myth of gold in the background) we think money is real. Money is the most unreal thing in the world. It’s a form of statistics.
We have to pay people for the work done on their behalf by machinery, because otherwise the manufacturer won’t be able to move the goods off the shelf. Now, that seems an outrageous idea, frankly in disaccord with the Protestant ethic. “You mean give people money? Where’s the money going to come from?” Well, money never did come from anywhere. It’s like asking: where do inches come from? It’s simply a question of realizing that technology was invented to save labor. That doesn’t mean in order to dismiss your employees, it means to let them have a vacation—in other words, a shorter workweek—and for you yourself, as the owner, less to do, so that you can go and gaze at the Moon or make love to your lady friend. Why not do it? Well, everybody feels guilty about it.
We have income tax, which is the most absurd system of accounting ever conceived. Have you ever figured out what it costs to pay income tax? Not just the tax itself, but the cost of paying it—to yourself and to the government? It’s colossal! When I raise the question, then: why do it at all? Why doesn’t the government simply take off the top as much money as it needs and issue the rest? It’d be much simpler. All this silly business that torments everybody would be canceled, and the department of internal revenue and all its offices, they needn’t be frightened of losing their jobs, because they could simply be the officials who work at the other direction. In other words, they could be the dispensers of the money to everybody, to pay them for the amount of work done by machinery on their behalf. I mean, doesn’t that make sense? What we’ve got against this is not, as it were, an intellectual or mathematical block, but a psychological block, and don’t see that that is the inner meaning of technology: to save labor.