The Life and Times of the Shirtless Back

Human existence these days is more about paying than about anything else.

You drift back into consciousness one morning in a bed that you paid for, in a home that you pay for.  Your alarm clock-radio iPod docking station multimedia centre stirs into life, slowly but surely filling the bedroom with music and chatter, while all the while consuming electricity that you pay for.

Scratching your nuts or your left boob as you trudge into the kitchen, you pay homage to your Neanderthal roots.  Maslow's hierarchy of needs kicks in at stage one as you acknowledge, "I'm hungry".  When you open the fridge, the light that switches on automatically illuminates either a proverbial Santa's grotto of fruit, vegetables, plastic-sealed leftovers, milk, fruit juices, meat and hopefully a beer or two, or if you're like me, a stark clinically-white gaping expanse not unlike a toy store warehouse on Boxing Day.  But regardless of what's in there, you paid for it.  In short, if we had no money then we would already be without two of the most basic tenets of human existence - food, and shelter.

People often visit the bathroom around this time of day.  You sit on a toilet you paid for, wipe your arse with paper you paid for, and flush away whatever delights you've deposited into a sewer system you pay for.  When you shower, unless you're masochistic or catholic, then the water is hot because you pay for it to be heated.  Little water on this planet arrives hot, unless your bathroom happens to be on the side of Mount Etna.  If it is then please stop reading, pack up your stuff, and get the hell out of there.

Of course you need money so you have to go to work.  You pay for the bus, the car, the train, or even the bike that gets you there.  And even when you're there, you have to pay to be there before you've even picked up a pen or touched a post-it note.  What's that you say?  You don't have to pay to work?  Really?  Who feeds you your lunch whilst at work - your employer?  No.  Your employer, instead, enforces an outdated, counter-evolutionary dress code policy that requires you to go out and pay for clothes that you wouldn't ordinarily buy just so that you can feel as though you share a connection with  the other people you work with.  And when you want to go home at the end of the day, you have to pay to do so or get stuck at the office.

But it doesn't end there.

I still write cheques for things from time to time.  And every time I do I have to pay for it.  OK, so it's somewhere under $3 per cheque, but how many cheques does the average person write in a lifetime?  Now multiply that number by the quantity of people on the planet who have a bank account.  Is that thousands of dollars?  Millions?  Billions?  In short, I have to pay to pay.  I have to pay for the privilege of paying someone else for something.

But the truth is even worse than that.

How do I know if I even have enough money to pay someone?  Well, I tend to use online banking.  Amazingly, neither the TD bank nor the CIBC charges me to access my own bank account details via the internet, but just when you think you've managed to escape it you realise you have to pay for that internet access.  When environmentalism started to get trendy just before the end of the 20th century every insidious corporate entity on the planet got on the bandwagon in an attempt to falsely demonstrate that they were environmentally conscious.  Paper bank statements (which you pay for via taxes that pay the postal service) began to be replaced by e-mails with PDF attachments.  But, in an ironic twist, once that service became available, banks began charging those customers who wished to continue to receive a paper bank statement.  So now you have to pay constantly for everything around you, even the most basic needs of a human being.  And then you have to pay for the ability to pay for those things.  And finally, just in order to establish whether or not you have the money to pay for the ability to pay for those things, you have to pay first.

If you go back now and read what I've written from the start, you will realise that you haven't really achieved very much yet but you've been paying for everything already.  And yet society seems surprised that we as a species don't do better.  Sadly, it's not even the case that very few people ever achieve their true potential before the day they die.  The problem is not only that the majority of people have to pay to do a job they hate, while all the time suffering from an unrealised dream of what they would do if money were not holding them back.

Alas, the whole truth is actually a whole lot worse.

Not only do few people ever reach their potential, but many fall in the opposite direction.  The world's streets are littered with grubby, starving, drunk, injured, ill people who started their lives in such a state of poverty that they never really stood a chance no matter what their work ethic or abilities might be.  I wonder how many geniuses are currently shaking a cup full of copper coins with pleading eyes when they should, instead, be curing diseases, harnessing sustainable energies, or pushing the boundaries of art, of space exploration, or of consciousness?  How many people buy lottery tickets because, despite the ridiculous odds stacked against them, they know that it is their only chance to ever push beyond the point of scratching around for a living instead of fulfilling their potential and making the greatest contribution to society that they could?

But the reality is even worse than that!

Our society is so sinister that even people such as I, brought up with a conscience that hangs around my neck like a millstone for my every waking minute, have to think twice before giving money to these people who need it the most.  I feel regret after I've tossed a few coins in that cup because the thought that goes through my mind is, "Am I really the person who should be donating?  Do I really have sufficient to be able to just give some away?  Am I really that far from being the person on their knees in the street, begging for enough just to keep me alive?"  The answer is no, and the quote I am constantly reminded of is, "There but for the grace of god go I".

The fact is that the system we live in makes it very, very difficult for humans to be equitable.  We have to fight, and pay, to be able to leave the nest.  We have to fight to make the rent.  And then if we ever manage to pool enough capital out of the economy to put a deposit down on a house, by the time we've finished paying for that house we're so old that we can't even eat or go to the toilet without someone helping us to do so.

In order just to consider this issue we have to fight to quiet our mind for a few minutes, desperately trying to avoid a society of bright colours, flashing lights, and babbling over-stimulation that occupies, distracts, and entrances us like the front of a Las Vegas fruit machine.  Yet we are told, and we tell our children, that this is "normal" and then get angry when they struggle to understand.  And if they disagree, we tell them that they are immature.  We tell them, "You'll understand one day," infer that they are stupid, undermine their self-esteem, and beat them down like a nail in a coffin until they are as indoctrinated into this system of blind stupidity as we are.

Yet we don't realise it.  We don't even acknowledge that what we are doing, and what we are doing to our children, is wrong.  And then every birthday and every xmas we bombard our children with materialistic goods as if to say, "Well, if you stop disagreeing with Mummy and Daddy then one day you'll be able to buy all this stuff yourself."  And then we act surprised when people riot and loot in London because they believe that they are owed these things but will never have the means to obtain them legitimately.  We get angry.  We say, "Well I paid for MY stuff so they should have to pay too."  We dismiss them as stupid or criminal.  We insist that the government not only puts a stop to it, but does so in the most inhumane way possible, with riot batons and water cannons, and all the while further angering and aggravating those people who already know that they have been deceived, duped, and royally fucked over by the system.

But the truth is much worse than that.

Why?  Because there is no need for anything to be paid for.  We, as a species, already have enough food, concrete, teachers, lab equipment, books, tools, tarmac, iPads for everyone to have one.  There are sufficient resources on the planet for everyone to have that home, that alarm clock, that bed, that education, that food and that love.  Yet we still continue to stick rigidly with money - an invention that dates back before the internet, before X-factor, before space travel, before Einstein, before Leonardo da Vinci, even before the wheel and almost as far back as the invention of fire.

Why?!  Why do we do this to ourselves and - much worse - why do we force all our seceding generations to make exactly the same mistake that we have, over and over?  I can't speak for you, dear reader, but I have come to the conclusion that we can do better.  I want to live in a world where everyone has more than they do now and, the really sad thing is that we could.  Let me say that to you again: we already have so much that everyone could have plenty.  There is already an idea that has been researched over 75 years and turned into a concept.  And that concept has been turned into a plan.  And that plan has now become a working project.  And that project has a name, "The Venus Project".

And yet the best reason we can think of for not dropping whatever we are doing right now, and starting it immediately, is because we're late for a meeting, or because our favourite show is on HBO and we might miss it.  Or because we selfishly, inconsiderately, naively tell ourselves that it is someone else's job to worry about that and - ironically - we need to get home and look after our kids.

Because we still keep telling ourselves that's the only way we can make sure our children don't lose the shirts off their backs too.