Easter Egg #02/02

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CoB acts as a focal point for outrage about the destruction of money. And because I’m the High Priest, when people want to give ‘those idiots a piece of their mind’, I’m who they want to shout at.

There are more than two arguments that are presented to me. But I’d say the vast majority fall into one of two camps.

The first one can be summarised as “Well, I couldn’t afford to burn £20!” In my experience its often expressed with a degree of contempt — for me and CoB.

The obvious implication is that destroying money requires financial privilege. Sadly, when directed at me, personally, this critique is very wide of its mark.

It also completely misunderstands the idea of sacrifice. The power of a sacrifice is not related to its ‘market price’. It’s the experience of loss for the individual that matters. In short, if you can’t afford to burn twenty, then burn a tenner instead. Or a fiver. Or throw some coins down a well.

Underneath the (mistaken) claim about (my) privilege though, lurks a deeper claim. Ultimately, saying “I can’t afford…” is a form of virtue signalling. It says that “my (i.e. the complainant's) relationship to money is more morally appropriate than yours”.

But such a claim is not intellectually, emotionally or spiritually sustainable against an individual who burns their money as a genuine act of ritual sacrifice. Nor is it sustainable against a Church dedicated to protecting, enhancing and evangelising such actions as a religious rite.

By far the largest and most embittered group of complainants are those who express outrage on behalf of ‘the poor’.

In the dream exchange the HIGH PRIEST lets rip on the ‘concerned middle-classes’. In my waking life I prefer to steer clear of such characterisations. Both ‘the poor’ and ‘the concerned middle-classes’ turn individuals into an economic category. Labelling people always serves to dehumanise them in some way.

[ — Of course, I am guilty of ‘labelling’, too. Not only in my dreamlife but also within this piece of writing. But what makes labelling with economic categories especially pernicious is that there’s no way of opting-out. You can move from one to another but you will always belong to one or another. Whereas if you don’t want me to categorise you according to your critique of money burning, you can just stop complaining about it! — ]

The example given by the HIGH PRIEST in the dialogue — QR codes for the homeless — is an extreme and especially awful one. It was supposed to be a solution to the problem of being homeless in an increasingly cashless economy. But the project’s designers — and the ‘concerned middle-classes’ who supported it — lost sight of the connection between money and personal sovereignty. Funds collected by ‘selling’ the stories of the destitute were to be administered on their behalf to ensure ‘financially responsible’ decisions were enacted.

Dignity, self-determination and spirit were factored out. And a utilitarian, functional and outcome-based mode of thinking was adopted (the sort of thinking that currently dominates our relations with money). The result — hanging QR codes around the necks of the homeless — was the inevitable and shameful conclusion.

CoB has been threatened with all sorts by those who considered themselves ‘acting’ on behalf of ‘the poor’.

In 2019, one particular objector promised to gather homeless people outside the Theatre where we were holding our event. He wanted to use ‘the homeless’ to ‘shame’ our congregation. Theatre management stood by us and publicly announced that CoB would go ahead. I issued a ‘Producer Statement’. We informed the protagonist that we’d offer free entry to any homeless person he brought along. And crucially we asked why he assumed that a homeless person would not want to take part in our religious rite.

In short, it was clear to us that the guy’s plan would exploit and denigrate the very people he’d claimed to want to help. Hopefully, that realisation dawned on him. Because despite his threats to involve charities and publicise his protest, nothing materialized. The event went ahead without incident.

Other threats made against CoB have included reporting us to the police for treason and promising ‘serious articles’ and exposés. On the spiritual side of things we’ve Christian Conservatives in the U.S. praying for our souls.

Should this letter get any attention from outside our community many will undoubtedly say ‘but the money they burn could go to people in need’’. Yes. But then CoB always takes more at the bar than is burned. Our congregation literally pisses away far more than we’ve ever destroyed.

That this fact doesn’t even register in the minds of complainants is a sure sign that what we are dealing with is not a rational response to destroying money, but an emotional one to the destruction of a sacred totem.

I finally burned my first tenner in 2007 after thinking about doing it for two years beforehand. Pathetic, really. It was just a tenner, after all. I then did a burn every year until 23 August 2015 when I did my first ritual with someone else. The following morning, I got the invitation to do the Cube Cinema Rituals on 22nd November 2015.

My prevarication over that first tenner now serves as a reminder. I don’t always manage to be Zen about people’s reactions. But I do try to be patient and understanding. Transgression can throw off powerful but mixed emotions.

A lot of negative reaction can be dealt with simply by staying calm and resolute. But some cannot. Some people are determined to have a row. Whichever intellectual path that takes (and, if I may be immodest, I often have more familiarity with those paths than my interlocuters) the inevitable end point is personal and spiritual.

Objectors must decide whether or not they believe that money burning can be a ‘real’ ritual sacrifice. As the vast majority of people have never experienced ritual sacrifice my interlocuters are usually not in the best position to make that judgement.

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