On The English Attitude To (Talking About) Money
Commonplace Newsletter #62
I’m English and as such I have a learned aversion to money talk. Perhaps such reticence was useful once, a way to mitigate mimetic envy in a highly classist and stratified society where everyone is in close proximity on a small island. Perhaps. Or maybe it was- or became- yet another means to keep proles like me in our place. If you don’t talk much about money, don’t think about it, don’t study how it works and how you go about making more of it then you rapidly become a live-for-the-weekend wage earner and thus eminently controllable.
So, with a slight nervous flutter in my belly, I’m going to talk a little about our reluctance to talk about money.
An American Tourist Walks Into a Bar
He was a parody of an American tourist, this guy. He came into the bar I was working in at the time- a few minutes walk from Buckingham Palace- and ordered a beer. ‘Hey buddy, can I get one of those warm beers you have on tap over here?’
(This was quite a few years ago, before the craft beer explosion on both sides of the pond. The prospect of an IPA pumped from a firkin in the cellar struck our man as a delightfully quaint exotic novelty, it seemed.)
I pumped it, let it settle a second, topped off the head just so (I was a half decent barman when I put my mind to it) and presented our man with his nut-brown pint of Doom Bar or whatever it was.
‘Cheers, mate.’ he said, using the words with the bold tone that you might say ‘merci beaucoup’ or some other foreign bit of politeness you picked up in a phrasebook.
‘What do I owe you there, buddy?’ He said.
‘That’ll be three fifty.’
‘Sure thing.’ Our man fished out his straining George Costanza wallet. ‘There ya go’
He handed me a crisp five dollar bill, Abe Lincoln looking up at me with an expression as nonplussed as my own.
‘We don’t accept that here, I’m afraid.’
‘I hear ya,’ he said and handed me a second picture of Honest Abe. Clearly our man thought this was some sort of a haggling situation. Or a bribery type scenario. The queue at the bar was now four deep. The mass of locals were getting restless, their own actually viable legal tender pinched between their thumb and forefinger.
After a surprisingly involved and lengthy conversation where I finally got it through to our man that we have our own currency here in Blighty, he eventually paid with an Amex card and I was able to serve the next punter and conduct the transaction correctly and in the proper English was, which is to say with a series of grunts, head-nods and eyebrow movements.
Anyway, I mention this little anecdote because our man’s boldness stuck with me. His brazen insistence on the dollars supremacy and his familiarity with it. From his accent (I’m guessing one of those Midwestern states that are all high school wrestling meets and county fairs) and his highly questionable socks and sandals ensemble he clearly wasn’t from the upper echelon’s of country club WASP society by any means, but he had a comfort with money that would be alien to the lower middle class 9-5er from Leicester or Coventry who would be his closest English equivalent.
And a part of me has contemplated that ever since, that cultural difference. Because for all of his brash, some might say crass displays as a tourist, he had an advantage that many of my fellow countrymen lack. He knew something we didn’t.
Talking About Money-Talk
‘But when it comes to what we call ‘the sordid subject of money’, we tend to become tongue-ties and uncomfortable. Some cover their embarrassment by joking, some by adopting a blistering, forthright, even aggressive manner; some become flustered and hurried, others may be over-polite and apologetic, or prickly and defensive. You will not often see an English person entirely at ease when obliged to engage in money-talk. Some may appear brash and bullish, but this is often as much a symptom of dis-ease as the nervous joking or apologetic manner.’
~Kate Fox, Watching The English, pp. 187
Now, I don’t know why this is the case, but it most certainly is. Even English people who work in finance struggle to engage in money-talk. Sure, they can discuss their trades and negotiations as an abstract part of what they do, but when it comes down to the actual business of their pay, say, or the possibility of a raise, they will become as squeamish as the rest of us and resort to our same ancient and default coping mechanism of making a joke about it all.
This all seems natural enough to me, but I’m sure that to the none UK people who make up the majority of my readership this all seems vaguely ridiculous. And you are right.
Now, if you were to detach and look at this anthropologically you can say that this is internally consistent within the framework of our social rules and customs seeing as they favour things such as privacy, modesty, politeness and so forth. Kate Fox in her outstanding anthropological guide to the (often weird) nature of our ways Watching The English makes this point. And she also points out how this money squeamishness is not exactly within our best interests.
So I for one would like to train myself to not default to it. (Interestingly, Fox also points out that English people can become a little less hesitant to engage in necessary money-talk when they do it in writing. This is perhaps worth keeping in mind if you have to conduct business with the English). And I don’t think I’m the only one.
‘Bitcoin Solves This’
I appeared as a guest on The Modern Sovereign podcast recently where we talked a lot about Crypto and NFTs within the context of personal and artistic sovereignty. Like the set up to a bad joke the conversation featured an American, a Canadian, a Scotsman and an Englishman. Via a series of digressions- which is what all actual conversations should consist of- we got on to the nature of the cross-cultural attitudes to money-talk. The North American contingent were a bit baffled but the Scotsman Ryan knew exactly what I was talking about when I said we don’t talk about money on this side of the pond.
And he also told me that Brits are in fact over-represented in the Crypto space and on Crypto Twitter and the like. This fascinated me. Maybe it goes back to Kate Fox’s point that we can talk about money if we do so in writing. Or maybe it points out that British people are tired of this reticence and want to break away from it because they see it as holding us back. Perhaps being on Crypto Twitter where you openly discuss your assets, your trades, the times your altcoin 100x’d has an extra rebellious and countercultural frisson for British participants.
And increasingly I do see the lack of money talk as holding us back. While I still by into the culturally engendered concepts of not being brash and flashy and witless and try-hard, I think completely shutting down and deflecting when it comes to talking about money is in fact symptomatic of The Wall In The Head. It is deeply unhelpful cultural conditioning that keeps you stuck in place.
So this is another thing that makes crypto, web3 and the quest for sovereignty so fascinating for me. It breaks down these walls or conformity and makes you curious about all sorts of aspects of business, economics, speculation and wealth that are normally verboten topics for people such as me to talk about.
If the good life, as I believe, consists of conversation and self-education and freedom and fun and risk and creativity, then letting go of money-talk taboos can be a freeing force that allows all of those things to further flourish.
That’s my stance anyway. Although I am trying to resist ending this with a cheap joke that undermines my above attempt at sincerity. But then that is the English way.
Tom, what a kind and undeserved surprise. Thank you kindly.
I appreciate the Alumni selections you offer. Don't worry...you are still the star for me.