In Taberna

XX - THE DESTRUCTION OF MONEY When we study the financial and currency system of today, we enter an area where there reigns profound confusion. There can be no doubt that we are living in an era of general deterioration of currencies. This is shown by the withdrawal of precious metals from circulation and by the constant migration of gold in its flight from danger zones to zones of greater financial safety. Inflationary and deflationary movements, devaluations, and withdrawals from circulation affect all currencies, which have to be protected artificially by the most intricate regulations. Possession of precious metals or foreign banknotes, export of holdings by the owner or his agents, re-importation of currency into the country of its origin – all are put under the strictest control. Eventually, under pressure of exchange difficulties, we see the state reverting to a kind of primitive barter economy, an economy of peculiar financial and economic consequences. All these mysterious and...

 SELF-DECEPTION BY PHOTOGRAPHY In a world of pure being, that is, in a world in which there can be no change, propaganda could not exist, no more than a difference between being and appearance, truth and falsehood. No deception could enter such a world – there would be no openings, no crevices to admit it. There could not even be such shadows as Plato believed to be cast by thought, shadows which came between the things and the ideas of things. Wherever the ideas formed in the human mind begin to predominate, there a process of separation sets in: the prototypes vanish while the images we are forming of them multiply. Without this process of ideation no science could have developed. For only as we begin to form ideas of things, does our reason demand to have these things explained. Without this separation between things and ideas, there would be no explanations forthcoming from the human mind. In mythology, for instance, the myth has no need to explain itself. It is only in the lat...