Cherie's Place

Long time readers will know that I enjoy reading the books and thoughts written by Christopher Lloyd.

I am subscribed to receive emails from ‘What on Earth Books‘, which add to his thoughts on the themes in his books and this one popped up in my email box today (including the picture above):

WHILST PUTTING the final touches to a new Indian edition of the What on Earth? Wallbook – due out next year – I happened to come across a remarkable seventh century Indian sage called Brahmagupta. He is the supposed inventor of the numbers 1-9 and the first person to use 0 to denote a place value  - a truly magic bullet that has transformed the practice of arithmetic.

Numbers have genuinely changed the world – spreading via the Islamic House of Wisdom in ninth century Baghdad, then to Italy via Leonardo of Pisa (better known as Fibonacci) in the early thirteenth century and finally across the globe with the inexorable rise of Western science.

Our modern lives are now utterly ruled by these 10 abstract symbols. Let’s zoom out for a moment and see how the big picture reveals the gargantuan impact of Brahmagupta’s ingenuity as his new-fangled numbers demonstrate their complete conquest over all three stages of human experience: global, local and personal.

1) Global – just think about what our world would be like without numbers. No computers, no GSM phones, no Internet – everything digital is instantly zapped into oblivion. Now remove all statistics, GDP, probability and betting. Of course there could be no stocks and shares, in fact no modern capitalism. Barter and exchange  - or at least a new Gold Standard  - would replace credit cards, Internet banking and paper money.

In fact, it doesn’t take too much imagination to see how artificial civilization as we know it depends almost entirely on these numeric symbols for its very survival.

2) Local - My recent experience with trying to get a small bank loan to help fertilise the green shoots of our successful but embryonic What on Earth Publishing business has caused various scales to fall from my eyes. One is the realisation that having numbers rule our everyday lives is not always something to be cheery about.

Most people agree that today we are in the midst of the worst global economic downturn in living memory. The only genuine way out – so hindsight suggests – is for new entrepreneurial, start up businesses to generate products and services that consumers want and thereby help to restore growth.

To do that, of course, you normally need a bank – the vortices of our financial, number-crunching world.  Banks make and destroy money out of thin air because today money is digits on a screen – not gold or silver (now just imagine how utterly magical our would seem to a medieval alchemist whose lifelong struggle was to turn lead into gold!).

Of course to build and grow a business you need start up capital – perhaps to build a product line or a channel to market. But, thanks to the appalling economic ruin presently engulfing us, banks are nowadays understandably highly risk averse. They require absolute confidence that any loans they make will be repaid.

So I fully expected that my local bank would demand my house as security for our small business loan. Fortunately, I have no mortgage or outstanding personal debts and the amount of the loan I sought was easily less than 10% of the value of my property…

Neil, the slightly rotund and seemingly amiable local branch manager of HSBC, assured me there would be no problem – he just had to run it through the system (an automated number-crunching, credit checking computer system) and then run it by the bank’s credit control team (who as a customer you never get to meet or talk to about your business).

Initially signs were extremely positive.

‘Yes!’ said Neil, “The system says we can lend you the money you want – probably without security!”

Hurrah!

Thinking that the loan was all but in the bag, I paid a large bill to my printers on time rather than make them wait several extra weeks for the loan to come through. What matter, I thought, because it only took our balance about £2,000 into the red, well within the limits of our agreed overdraft facility.

Bu then I did not hear from Neil for two weeks, which seemed strange. I chased him, asking for an update.

“Ahem – I’m afraid we’ve hit a problem,” he sheepishly explained. “Now the system says that since you are now financing your business on debt not revenues, it won’t allow me to lend you anything at all.”

So within a fortnight the bank had gone from offering us tens of thousands of pounds as a loan to refusing to lend us a penny.

I was dumbfounded.

“Are you telling me that if I had not paid my bills on time, you would have made me the loan. But now that I have you won’t?”

Neil apologised saying there was nothing he could do as he couldn’t ‘override the system’.

‘But you can have my house as security…..” By now I was blathering on in disbelief…. ‘But I have no personal debt, no mortgage, and the business has never exceeded its overdraft facility and we have a perfect record for paying its bills …. And you said we are a valued customer…. And the economy needs small growth business like us to revive….and the money will all feed into the local economy…… and.”

But there was no point.

The reality is that Neil has no actual function other than to relay what the system says. He is a charade. He says he loves our business, our books, our mission, our passion. But that’s totally irrelevant. If the computer says no, – then it’s no. End of story.

His final words to me were:

“We cannot not lend to you as your business is not mature enough, we want to see more evidence of income and growth before we will be in a position to lend you anything”.

And then I put down the phone because words are truly useless in the face of a world ruled by abstract numbers.

3) Personal – The personal consequences of a world ruled by number devils are just as horrific. Such simple symbols represent the ultimate abstractions, delicious fodder that appeals exclusively to the left side of our brains. Numbers delight our left-minded neurons because they are fragmented, controllable, solvable and right or wrong. It doesn’t matter that the world these symbols inhabit and construct is utterly illusory and totally divorced from natural reality, because, for the operating system represented by the left side of our brains, control and certainty, is, literally, all that counts.

So no surprises that our right-side emotional, personal, holistic, natural, visual, artistic, empathetic, spiritual selves is drowned out and crushed by the collective tyrannies of GDP, credit scoring, share prices, bank bonuses and interest rates. In fact so utterly is our species now ruled by abstract numeric symbols that, ironically, no body is in control at all!

I guess the global financial crisis has an upside afterall by exposing the left-brain delusion  – underpinned by a world of abstract numbers – so it is finally being laid bare for all to see. Witness how today’s economic forecasts are even worse than our weather forecasts! And as for a pension – forget it – they are a fictitious futuristic mirage!

Brahmagupta, you may have been a sage in your day – and, in the best Indian traditions, your ingenuity was utterly profound. But I am sorry to say that the unintended consequences of what you devised have earned you the hottest seat in my personal Divine Comedy. Located just alongside Neil from HSBC, right in the middle of the burning fiery furnace of hell, is this Indian guru, the number devil himself.

Best Wishes,

-chris

PS: I would normally do a little quote from the post and a link, but the page isn’t displaying properly…

Tags: Books, Chris Lloyd, Christopher Lloyd, Life, What on Earth