A Tale Of Two Monsters

Stephen L. Doll

1989

Published in:

Section 3 Newsletter April 1989, No. 68
The Northwest Technocrat, 4th quarter 1989, No. 317

In 1818, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote a book. As noisome as this was to a society in which female writers frequently had to use pseudonyms in order to get published, Mary had earlier tweaked puritanical noses by capturing the affections of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley who, unfortunately, already had a wife. (Mary and Percy were finally married when his first wife died in 1816.)

What concerns us is not Mary Shelley's seeming knack for flaunting the status quo of the early 1800s. What is more important to us is her book, Frankenstein, and how we may relate it to the present mess in which we find ourselves.

As any literary buff or moviegoer knows, the Frankenstein story is a tale of the archetypal mad scientist (a legacy for which Mrs. Shelley may be forgiven), Baron von Frankenstein, who manages to assemble a number of various and sundry body parts and, with a jolt from his electrodes, revivifies this melange of metatarsals, creating a hulking, muddled monster. Naturally, Dr. Frankenstein's creation eventually goes out of control and terrorizes the countryside.

Dr. Frankenstein had his human-made monster to deal with. We have our own monster, just as muddled, but far more dangerous. The greatest danger is that this monster is also a creation of humankind but has been around so long that its creators allowed the monster to become the master and will go to any lengths to protect their creation.

The monster is, of course, the Price System, that outmoded, hulking misanthrope of antiquity that dictates that men and women must work by the sweat of their brow in order to secure a certain amount of a medium of exchange that they in turn trade in for things they need. A fallacy that springs forth at the outset is the placing of a philosophical value on people's services and on the goods they purchase, subject to the whims of the bargaining parties. It is inconceivable to think that in a high-energy, technological age, we still use this system of fish-market haggling to control the consumption of our resources, but of course we do. It is the only means by which those who control the medium of exchange may exercise their dominance over the population as a whole.

The Price System monster is a smiling, deceptive one that tells us that if we work hard, diligently and honestly, we will accomplish much in the way of securing the things we need for a comfortable life. Of course, such assurances ring as false as a politician's promise when one enters the real world of debt and competition for money. There are simply too many hustlers, too many winners, too many drug dealers, too many fellows being paid millions for beating each other up, and, just to make ends meet to believe in the so-called work ethic, a concept that the monster uses to perpetuate itself.

The Price System monster is also an accomplished hypnotist, a talent that it has used effectively to manipulate its own creators. For thousands of years it has succeeded in mesmerizing people into believing that they cannot exist without paying due homage to the monster.

But as time went on and superstition fell to science and reason, something went wrong with the monster as it did in Shelley's story. The masters that it had perversely held in abeyance for so many years started driving tractors. They devised ways to make more things faster and better in order to distribute them to a wider field of consumers. And finally they started realizing that the physical planet, Earth, could not support the monster forever.

In desperation the monster, adaptable as it had become through millenia of experience, fought back. It created shortages. It plowed surplus food under to keep prices up. When the factory output overwhelmed the ability of the people to pay for the goods, it snapped its fingers, and credit appeared. When people could not continue to feed the monster because they couldn't afford increasing medical bills, and also were convinced that when a loved one died so did their means of livelihood, the monster created insurance companies and lawsuits.

That's not all the Price System monster has done in its all-out, life-or-death struggle to save itself. As it has used its power over humankind to assure its continued existence, it has used its human-made cousin, technology -- which threatened to destroy it -- to revivify itself, much as Dr. Frankenstein used his electrodes to zap his monster to life. The Price System monster directs its slaves to use their machines to level forests, to pollute rivers, to deal death and destruction, even to withhold things that would benefit humankind until they promise to inject an adequate transfusion of green blood into the veins of the monster.

Even children are not spared. From toddler to teen, the child's loyalty to the monster is ingrained. Children, for whom we claim such a high regard, spend a lot of time on doorsteps, clutching either a housekey or, Willy Loman-like, overpriced boxes of candy they are coerced into selling because, somehow, their school or club's budget always seems to fall short. Laughing clowns, ever at the monster's beck and call, lure them into fast food outlets, while cartoon figures coax them into the snack food aisles where the next generation of heart attacks are nurtured. The monster even lurks in the halls of the places where children are supposed to learn the things they need to grow into useful, worthwhile adults. It smiles and tells the children that other children won't like them unless they wear the latest name brand clothes or demand that their parents pay 30 or 40 dollars so that they can advertise a soft drink across their little chests. Worst of all, it uses their schools to teach them that their prime purpose in learning is to go out and slave to feed the monster.

The Price System's hold on humankind is so tenacious that intelligent people still look to the monster to deliver them from the problems that the monster itself created. Medical technology has advanced phenomenally over the last 50 years, yet it remains unavailable to many who must resort to public begging to satisfy the demands of Price System medicine. With all the things technology has provided to make life easier and more comfortable, we find ourselves working more jobs and longer hours and having less time to enjoy the benefits of our prosperity. We suffer indignity and abuse on our jobs and turn our heads when we see something wrong in order to maintain our tenuous hold on security. And to top it all off, we lie back in mute complacency and take whatever the Price System dishes out -- poor quality goods, child pornography, higher taxes, inflation, rampant drug use, ruination of the environment, et al -- in the silly belief that the Price System monster will make everything all right in the end if we just feed it enough.

In Mary Shelley's time there were those opposed to mechanized travel on the grounds that they believed dire consequences would result if people were to travel faster than they could physically move. And in a Price System mode they would be right. Therein lies the root cause for our social distress.

Humankind is caught up in a hell-bent-for-leather scramble to keep up with the technologies they have created. Rather than sitting back and letting their creations work for them, they are stubbornly lashed astride their mount, vainly striking their rowels into the faltering flanks of the Price System monster upon which they have depended for so long. And their mount is falling ever farther behind.

This, then, is why we are setting records in teen suicides, why we immerse ourselves in drugs and pickle ourselves in alcohol to escape the maddening pace that the Price System demands of us. We hustle. We bustle. We curse when the line doesn't move fast enough. We rail at the computer that takes a full five seconds to give us the mail when five years ago we were happy to get a letter back in five days. We attempt to utilize our technologies in a silly beat-the-clock race while the monster bellows, "Time is Money!"

A classic case in point of the Price System monster's modus operandi is the booming business in drug and alcohol treatment centers. Nowhere can be seen a better example of a self-feeding Price System situation, in which the Price System generates sufficient stress to create a social problem, then comes up with a high-priced palliative that, in truth, does nothing more than feed the ever-grumbling maw of the monster, thus strengthening its power over society. And all the while it is being fed more and more of its life-sustaining currency by promoting and advertising anti-drug campaigns to divert attention from the real culprit.

Any organism, amoeba or politico-economic system will fight its hardest when it is struggling for its life. And it won't care whom it hurts in the process. This is what we are witnessing at present: the Price-System organism's desperate, reckless attempt at self-preservation.

Technocracy presents a reasonable, scientific approach to the social disruption that the Price System monster is creating in its death throes. It is a planned social structure that would guarantee a maximum standard of living for each and every citizen of North America, an equal, irrevocable share in the bounty of our continent with minimal output of physical effort. It is only our blind fealty to the Price System monster, born of fear, of want, and of a nebulous notion of individual freedom (which, of course, is something the monster will never allow) that keeps us from achieving this end.

Frankenstein is a classic horror story, a tragedy of misdirected technology. More tragic still is the fact that Mary Shelley's own story is a classic account of the tribute the Price System demands of so many talented people. Frankenstein turned out to be Mary Shelley's only work of note, not for lack of writing skill, but for the fact that, following the death of her husband in 1822, she was forced into a life of writing hack material to keep food on the table.

It is a pity that a Technocratic society was not available to Mary Shelley and her contemporaries. Who knows what masterpieces she may have produced had she been freed of the necessity of putting food on the table?

Such freedom is available now, to us. More the pity will it be if we choose to exercise a deceptive freedom and let the Price System monster take us with it when it goes.