A Theory of the Panic

By Roger Rosenblatt

Try this theory on for size: people value money desperately because they value one another desperately; thus the cause of panic in the recent stock-market plunge is not that people will lose their dollars but that they will lose their sense of community. Did someone holler, "Crackpot!"? But look:

For the past couple of weeks, the nation has watched itself roll toward ruin because people were losing their money in bales. If one were tasteless enough to ask a big loser what exactly he was losing, he would sputter, incredulous, "What am I losing? My boat! My car! My home, my beautiful home! My children's educations! Expensive schools! My clothes! My dinner! My dollars!" All true, every sorrowful word. People have been mourning the passing of their money for all the things that money can do, and what money can do is impressive. Money can build cities, cure cancers, win wars. The sudden acquisition of the stuff can toss our spirits into the air like a hat. The sudden disappearance of the stuff can freeze us witless before the ticker.

Money can do considerably more. It offers power, an almost unique form of power, not simply because it allows us to acquire and possess things but because it is we who determine its worth; we who say a ruby costs more than an apple; we who decide that a tennis court is more valuable than a book. ! Paradoxically, money creates a deep sense of powerlessness as well, since technically we are not able to provide money for ourselves; someone or something else must do that for us -- our employers or, until recently, our stocks. All that, money can do; and when such essential, familiar functions are snatched from one's life, small wonder that people may grow wild, frantic, even (as in the shooting in a stockbrokers' office in Miami last week) murderous.

What money can do, however, is not the same as what money is. Return for a moment to the theory: people value money because they value one another. In other words, the usefulness of money is directly related to and established by continuous mutual need. People work for money to buy things that other people make or do, things that they cannot or will not make or do for themselves but that they deem necessary for some definition of self-improvement. The mere existence of other people creates a market for goods; a market for goods, a potential source of human betterment.

So a baker buys a piano because he cannot make one, and yet, rightly or wrongly, he judges the possession of a piano to be necessary for his pleasure, stature, worth. The piano maker, in turn, may buy TIME magazine because, rightly or wrongly, he deems TIME necessary for his pleasure, stature, worth. Only God knows who gets the better of such deals, but the fact is that the deals are not only economic but social transactions, which have been conducted continually since the first tradesman said to a customer, "I will not give you what I have done for nothing, but I will sell it to you; thus will we persuade each other that both our lives have been enhanced."

Abstractly, then, money is one of the ways, indeed a universally accepted way, we make connections. Cash is cold, so the connections may feel cold, but real blood flows through them. These connections constitute one of the central means by which societies cohere, by which they sustain and characterize themselves. One reason that the poor so severely test a civilization's morality is that the poor are unable to participate in the connections money makes. Lacking the wherewithal to either buy or sell, the poor in effect barter their poverty in an odd exchange; society "buys" their poverty through charity or taxes and thus enhances itself with good and decent feelings, as well as with the general benefit of the whole. In this context, "the poor are always with us" could seem an ironic, quasi-malicious misstatement. It is the fact that the poor are not with us, are removed from the basic social transaction, that makes (or ought to make) their plight a public trust.

Still, that basic social transaction of buying and selling remains the standard operation of human business. The operation may be standard because buying and selling encompasses, encourages the fundamental, often tormenting, impulse toward human perfectibility; because the simple act of purchase implies a perpetual quest for self-improvement. This is not to say that money is the only way of establishing self-improvement; conventional if occasionally insincere wisdom suggests that money is the cheapest way to improve oneself. Spiritual thinkers forswear the power of money because they prefer to have God and not Mammon responsible for human connectedness. Yet the connections that money makes among people are not necessarily aspiritual if, like David Hume, one defines money as the oil that lubricates the social machine.

Whoever first came up with the idea of money must have realized that money would not only symbolize the value of objects but that inevitably it would also prove the value of people, since people could only obtain that proof by dealing with one another. Such values may be illusory, but they are values commonly agreed upon and so function as facts. The knowledge that others exist to produce things for you is a way of knowing that they exist to produce you, and you them. All over the world, like sparking bonfires, these acts of reciprocal production are sustained by money, which moves through the populations belonging to no one and everyone at once, marked, untraceable, dirty, laundered, hard, soft, old, new, tying billions of people together in an ancient arrangement that has kept the earth spinning like a coin.

When the coin begins to wobble, as it has in the past weeks, a fear seizes the mind that is disorienting, rattling. The fear is not merely that of the loss of possessions but of self-possession, which in some sense is bought and sold from person to person in infinite daily bargains. To lose money is frightening. To lose touch with others is more frightening still. Losing touch may cause the panic of the times.