Viruses are everywhere and not just the computer kind. Summer and winter we are surrounded by people coughing and sneezing, and we spend far too much time coughing and sneezing ourselves. If you live in the city, it's easy to see how these viruses get passed along, in crowded subways and elevators. But out here in the suburbs, where we have so much space and so little human contact, how on earth do the viruses get from one person to another? Do they develop legs like fleas, and jump?
I think I have the answer, but you won't like it. It came to me in the supermarket, as I watched change being made by an unfortunate young woman who was all-too-obviously in the terminal stages of some highly infectious disease. She counted the money, counted it twice, and put it in my hand – an innocent Typhoid Mary at the checkout.
Imagine this scene repeated millions of times every day all over the country. Medical researchers have spent more than a hundred years tracing the vectors of disease. Rats have been blamed – although I never met a rat I didn't like – ticks and fleas, food and water, kissing, sneezing, sex, air conditioning. But here's my theory: diseases are transmitted by money, dirty money, passed endlessly from hand to hand with no thought of hygiene whatsoever. This theory may not explain every single human disease and ailment, perhaps not lower back pain or insomnia. But I bet it explains how cold and flu viruses pass between strangers so easily.
The good news is that we are slowly moving away from the archaic, hazardous habit of handling coins and currency notes. Some nations, like Sweden, are trying to abolish them altogether and move into an era of clean, abstract money – in other words, credit. Already, we can buy almost anything, anywhere, with our personal hygienic plastic card that has not been contaminated by hundreds of unknown hands. Credit is obviously the way of the future. As the 21st first century progresses we can hope to be freed from old-fashioned, physical money, and therefore freed from the ravages of these miserable viral diseases.
Abstract money weighs nothing, takes up no space, and can be stolen in enormous amounts with very little difficulty. The days of gas station holdups and armored truck robberies are almost past. Looking into the future, we can see a utopian cashless economy – we’re already halfway there – with no real money, no common colds, and no rough criminals out there committing twenty dollar robberies. The criminals will be safely at their keyboards, shifting millions in germ-free invisible assets from one invisible place to another.
Sigmund Freud said that money does not bring happiness, because happiness is the fulfillment of infantile wishes, and money is not the object of infantile wishes. Unfortunately, Freud failed to specify what exactly the object of infantile wishes is, but I think the banks have guessed it right. What every infant wants, and therefore what must be the true source of human happiness, is an unlimited, non-repayable lease on the future: not money, but credit.
Copyright: David Bouchier
