Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

168 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
malign de facto center of power in The Apple Cart. Because its profits depend
on breakdowns, accidents, and waste, it effectively suppresses all inventions
and innovations that would create greater efficiency or make durable
goods truly durable (6:328–29).
Artificial inequality even distorts the market forces of supply and
demand idolized by capitalist theorists. Because what is called “effective
demand” depends on having money to offer, starvation does not create
“demand” if those starving have no money, while idle people with more
money than they need to satisfy their genuine needs begin to lust after
luxuries: useless toys that society calls “status symbols.” The economy is
diverted from the production of genuine wealth and devotes itself to producing
what Shaw called “illth.” “Exchange value itself, in fact, has become
bedevilled like everything else, and represents no longer utility, but the
cravings of lust, folly, vanity, gluttony, and madness, technically described
by genteel economists as ‘effective demand’” (“Economic Basis” 21).
Money, Idolatry, and Civilization
The artificial inequality produced by unequal distribution of society’s
goods has a purpose:
There is a solid reason for such inequalities in all societies which, like
our own, are based on Idolatry. It is absolutely necessary, if you are to
have an ordered society at all, that Bill Jones, who may possibly be a
more muscular man than Jack Smith, should nevertheless obey Jack
Smith even when he has not the least notion of what Jack Smith is
driving at. To induce him to do it, you must somehow contrive to
make him idolize Jack Smith. . . . If that is to be done, you must put a
crown or a tiara on Jack’s head; prevent him from ever doing—or at
least letting anyone see him doing—anything that Bill does; give him
much more money and quite different clothes, besides lodging him in
a much finer house and surrounding him with minor idols to set the
example of worshipping him. (“Simple Truth” 161–62)
It would appear that inequality, despite its terrible attendant evils, is necessary
“if you are to have an ordered society at all,” but it makes sense only
if the idolized actually do the superior work: if the governing class actually
governs and does not just live in idle uselessness. The difficulty is that the
system is artificial and cannot guarantee that the most competent will
have the reins of power. The idolatrous awe of money obscures true distinction,
but the competent have a power apart from that conferred by