Bob’s Memoir: 4,000 Years as a Free Demon
58
Wealth
I’M RICH in the wealth of this world. By anyone’s standard. Peninnah has told me that in terms of equivalents, I’m richer than Mansa Musa, purportedly the richest man who ever lived. In today’s dollars, his wealth would have been well over $400 billion. I’m up around there, too.
There’s a big difference in the way wealth is measured, though. Mansa Musa’s wealth was in gold. I don’t know that anyone ever calculated the value of his city, his land holdings, his slaves, his wives, his palace, etc. He had $400 billion worth of gold!
My wealth is in various stock holdings which I’ve traded over the ages. When Peninnah began divesting our shares of oil, which I’d invested in just a few years AC, she turned them into real estate, technology, space exploration, manufacturing, and various mining and resource operations. We even have a number of farms and plantations, like those where our chocolate is grown. The value of any of those ventures can rise and fall on a daily basis.
But gold? A bar of gold is roughly 8.5"x2.5"x1". That’s 400 Troy ounces, or approximately 438 fine ounces. That means, each brick of gold (like the ones you see pictured at Fort Knox) weighs a little over twenty-seven pounds. If we computed the number of pure gold bars represented by $400 billion, we would get around 300,000 bars of gold!
If you just stacked them one on top of the other, we’re talking about a tower five miles high!
When Mansa Musa began liberally distributing his gold on his pilgrimage to Mecca, he destroyed the local economies for more than a decade.
My wealth? Ha! I have a stack of paper, maybe a foot high, that records the shares I own of various enterprises, the property I own, and the bank accounts I have. Each piece of paper has been assigned a value, totaling around $450 billion, but that value varies day by day, depending on the market. I try to always carry some local currency with me when I travel, because you can’t buy groceries with stock certificates.
I try to do good with my wealth. Peninnah bought us several dozen homes, many of which I’ve never traveled to. Some are as small as a little ranch in Kansas or a condominium in San Francisco. Others are as large as an entire South Sea Island. Each property employs a dozen to a couple hundred people to maintain it. I like this arrangement because I don’t expect income from those properties, so the money I pay in salaries (and property taxes) goes directly into the local economy.
There are businesses that are ‘for profit.’ These include our cocoa plantations, for example, which employ people who grow our crops. The people are paid a good standard of living, but even after wages, crop development, taxes, and equipment, we turn a healthy profit on the produce. And, yes, we pay taxes on that. In fact, we also own a share of the chocolatier who buys the beans from our plantations. They process the chocolate into a hundred different products that are sold to various exchanges around the world that distribute to food outlets, and other manufacturers. We make a nice profit on each of those sales. Yes, I pay taxes on that profit, too.
Ultimately, every business I am involved in pays taxes on as many as a dozen different levels for the money it makes. I receive my share of the profit, and I personally pay taxes on it. And I still get wealthier every day.
What about charity? And research? And education? Yes. We fund hospitals, medical research facilities, educational institutions, scholarships, and hundreds of other worthy causes. The only thing we do not fund is religious organizations. Of any sort. I’ve built a number of temples in my life and have insisted on paying and caring for the people who served to create that temple. But I’ve never paid a priest. I’ve never refused to pay taxes on any income that establishment receives. And if churches, mosques, and temples around the world were truly not for profit, they would be required to use every penny they take in for good works. Religion should be a net-zero operation, in my opinion. I do not include evangelism in the category of good works.
Why go on about wealth? I’m not a fan. I consider wealth to be a form of slavery, not just for those who possess it, but for everyone they possess. I mean employ. In reality, I believe the women I actually possess are freer than most employees.
Sometime around seventy-five or eighty years ago, I became friends with a fellow I knew only as Bucky. He was quite a thinker. He built all kinds of futuristic structures, and I even recreated a few of them in Areola. Eventually, I included his structural philosophy in the design of my space ship.
He studied the universe and came up with some startling things.
“You’ve been around a while, Bob. You’ve seen the world change. We’re constantly doing more and more with less and less. Now look at the radio, for instance. Just a decade ago, radios were cumbersome things that were a huge piece of furniture in a person’s home. Wonderful things. They brought people news of the world. You might say, they made the world smaller.”
Well, I certainly understood that. In the 1770s, I rode a horse for nearly two months to get from California to Pennsylvania, then another two months back. Now people flew from one to the other in hours! It was amazing.
“But look at this radio,” Bucky continued, holding out a device that fit in the palm of his hand. “This little thing connects me just as well to the radio stations around the country as that big monstrosity sitting in my living room! What’s the difference? We—people in general, not you and me specifically—learned how to make a transistor that’s an inch long that would do the work of a dozen big vacuum tubes! And with a battery to operate it, I can carry my transistor radio with me wherever I go. I have much more contained in much less!”
“I see, Bucky. But people still need the same amount of food,” I said, trying to come up with something to contradict his argument. “We don’t do more with less food. If anything, we have to produce more and more as the population increases.”
“But even in food production, our barns and silos are overflowing. Where it once took a hundred acres to feed a family, now we can feed the world on what is produced on our farms. And with farm machinery, it takes fewer people to produce that food. People aren’t leaving the farms for the city because the work is too hard. They leave because there isn’t enough work there to keep them busy.”
“Why do we have so many poor and malnourished and sick?” I asked. “In this country of all places! How can I even begin to take care of people?”
“Scarcity economy,” Bucky answered. “For hundreds—maybe thousands—of years, we’ve held up the notion that people need to deserve to live. They don’t deserve adequate food, housing, medicine, or even safety unless they somehow earn it. That whole mindset of having to earn your way meant we needed a standard of what people were worth. We said time is worth a dollar and a half an hour. But if you’re a doctor, it’s worth ten or fifteen dollars an hour. If you work putting nuts on bolts all day long in a factory, that’s a dollar and a half an hour. If you walk around making sure people keep putting the nuts on the bolts, that’s worth five dollars an hour. If you sit in an office ‘managing’ the process of putting nuts on bolts, that’s worth $100 an hour. But who is actually contributing to the gross product? The guy who’s putting nuts on the bolts.”
“I never used that in any of my times building temples, and don’t use that in my infinity room. Everyone who works for the temple in whatever way, eats and is taken care of.”
“Even that may be too greedy, Bob. Consider this: The Declaration of Independence says, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’ Show me where in that document it says anything about ‘if they deserve it,’ or ‘if they earn it,’ or even ‘if they work.’ We recognize this in our most primitive institutions. A man in prison is still given food, shelter, and clothing. In the least effective way possible.”
“The problem as I see it is the whole minimum wage thing,” I suggested. “We’re still equating people with money. So, instead of guaranteeing a minimum income or wage, we should be guaranteeing food, shelter, and clothing. For everyone, with no exceptions. Sure, if you work for it, you can have better quality food, shelter, and clothing. You can have other things, but your worth as a human is not dependent on those things.”
“And education, Bob. How can anyone truly grow as a person unless they have access to a comprehensive education? When a child progresses from elementary to more advanced education, the first thing we ask him is ‘What are you studying?’ We expect him to answer, ‘law,’ ‘biology,’ ‘medicine,’ ‘mathematics.’ We expect him to be specialized. But the only great advances in humanity come from those who have a comprehensive understanding rather than a specialized understanding,” Bucky said.
That was just a sample of my conversations with Bucky over the years and he made sure I had signed copies of his books for my library. But it bothered me no end. When Peninnah told me I was the richest man on earth, it depressed me. Oh, I was happy to have a new home or ten. I was pleased that we could employ a thousand or ten thousand people.
But it all seemed like a drop in the ocean when I looked at all that needed to be done. I wanted to promote those unalienable rights. I had money. What else did I need?
Of course, none of that applied to Areola. Millions of people lived in my little world, but no one went without any needed thing. And people were valued because they were people. We cared for thousands we’d rescued over the years who could not care for themselves. They still had their needs met and the opportunity to contribute in any way they found. I realized the idea that everyone who works for the temple received what they needed was antiquated and might have been a reasonable concept when I was building Xanadu, but in Areola, everyone ate. Everyone had shelter and clothing (if they wanted clothing). We didn’t require clothing and the weather was such that it wasn’t really needed. The scarcity philosophy that ‘there’s no such thing as a free lunch,’ was an archaic idea that had no place in our world of plenty.
We weren’t really a melting pot, either. People clustered together by background, interest, level of technology, religion, region of origin, and even time in history. When people discovered others they wanted to live with and have children with, then the melding of races and ideas began. But when children came along, people began to age with them. Children grew up and their parents grew old. Eventually, those who had children on Areola or who were born there died.
I still didn’t understand how the world worked. Ideas were freely exchanged and the libraries became the centers of our educational system. Whatever one wanted to learn could be learned in the library. The possibilities were infinite.
I’m certain I had a point to make with that whole story. I can draw all kinds of conclusions from it that probably don’t have relevance. Even gods who are generally seen as horrific in their worst appearances have a humorous side to them. My time with A’a reminded me of my time with Zeus, only with less fucking.
I also noticed that there are phenomena that the gods don’t understand, even in the world they created. A’a had no idea what came over the girl that made her tell the story she did. I didn’t mention the fact that she’d seen us setting up the last stone. Perhaps she was just a gifted storyteller and made it up on the spot. It wouldn’t be the first time a storyteller saw something they didn’t understand and made up a story about it. Read the daily news.
A’a did show me his island getaway. I couldn’t see it until we’d sailed right onto the beach. He had quite a comfortable dwelling there and said he just needed to get away from his brothers at times. And it got soggy at the bottom of the sea, even for a sea god. I wondered if Poseidon had joined the Greek gods on Olympus when they withdrew and if so, did he have a sea there to rule over or was he happy to be on dry land?
I will say that since that time, I have searched for the island of A’a on maps to no avail. When satellite imagery became available, I searched all over the South Pacific for an unidentified island and could not find one. I’m sure the imagery would have revealed it, just as airport x-rays showed my satchel. The video cameras saw it, too.
I found reference to an island called Land of Davis after a pirate who had sighted it but did not land. After many decades, reference to the mysterious island disappeared from maps and it is all but forgotten. It is possible that Davis did see the island during a time when A’a was entering or leaving his secret retreat.
I will also say that this story illustrates that gods are capricious. Or perhaps they quickly forget. I encountered the god of the sea again years later (after I’d found another island just at the time of its mass marriage ritual) as I sailed westward and was caught in a battle between the brothers Tawhirimatea and Tu (also sometimes identified as Tangaroa or A’a). That was when my voyage on the Pacific came to an abrupt end. My little ship was cast half way across Australia by the warring brothers.
What brought all this to mind was our refuge while we were planning the next season of To Boldly Go. Peninnah had managed to acquire a very nice villa on a Pacific Island and we’d been enjoying relative peace and quiet—mostly just staying in Areola. People did seem to enjoy popping out to see earth’s sun and to play on the sandy beach of the Pacific. It was getting to be time, however, when I needed to shoot a test pilot of the concept for the next series. I was going to emerge from isolation yet again.
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