Crash! Bang! Wallop – what a crisis!

"Man, I wish that stupid castle didn't keep getting in the way of my swimming. What a mindless tribute to the endless human capacity for tackiness."

The European debt crisis is primed to explode. The US economy is a ticking time bomb with a short fuse. Britain, meanwhile is stuffed to the guts with economic H-BOMBS that could go OFF at ANY SECOND and incinerate your GOLDFISH – quick, better go stock up on lead-lined tanks and reinforced concrete versions of those little castles that everybody puts in there for some unfathomable reason, even though fish (being gill-bearing aquatic vertebrates rather than warty medieval monarchs) probably couldn’t give a wet slap about the detail on the crenellations or the defendability of the cornices. They’re just fish, man. They’re never going to need to hold their ground against a horde of rampaging Jutes.

There was supposed to be a point to that first paragraph, a point which goes something like this: there’s a certain specific terminology that’s springing up around the state of the western economy, one which paints the whole thing as a horrendously mismanaged superweapon whose hapless controllers are always just seconds away from making the final moronic mistake that will trigger the whole thing and doom us all. Imagine the Death Star being piloted by the Chuckle Brothers, and you’re more or less there.

Human society has a fascinating predisposition for taking metaphors and grinding them so deeply into the fabric of conversation that we forget that they’re even there in the first place. There’s a funky book by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson called Metaphors We Live By that lifts the lid on this whole “conceptual metaphor” business, with examples like TIME IS A PRECIOUS COMMODITY*:

Do you have much time left?

He’s living on borrowed time.

How do you spend your time these days?

That flat tyre cost me an hour.

I lost a lot of time when I got sick.

Thank you for your time.

(*the authors insist on always writing out these metaphors in big capital letters, and I’m not going to disagree. I don’t want the robot death police smashing down my door for crimes against linguistics.)

Time, of course, is not a precious commodity. There’s absolutely loads of it around. In fact, the whole notion of time as a collection of discreet little chunks is a specifically Western idea, which plenty of people – say, Hindus – might disagree with. Yet because we’ve managed to precisely quantify time, and tie it up so closely with the way we understand work and pay, we’ve come to see time as a sort of currency. This idea has become so embedded in our culture that we talk about it constantly, reinforcing it through our language, without really thinking about it as a metaphor anymore. We go straight from the words to the emotional response, bypassing any conscious awareness of either how the mechanism works, or that there might be any alternatives.

This rubbish stock photo for motivational business presentations is a pretty strong argument for the idea that "Time = Money" is absolute doggyplops.

Getting back to the point then, this whole “economic bombshell” notion could well be a lot more dangerous than it sounds. If the same thing starts to happen here as with time, if people get so used to saying it that it just worms its way into their subconscious, drops anchor and refuses to leave, then there might be trouble. Because an economy is not a timebomb – it isn’t really a physical thing at all. It certainly can’t suddenly engulf you in white-hot fire, wracking your body with searing pain like you’re on the cover of an old Cradle of Filth album. I’m no expert on economics, but from what I can tell from lazily flicking through the financial news, the important thing seems to be confidence. There’s a load of people out there with absolutely truckloads of cash that they’re happy to keep pumping around the planet so long as they’re confident that everything’s alright. If that confidence starts to wobble, though, they shut down all the valves and sit on their enormous money mountains while the rest of us scrabble for pennies.

Confidence, like time, isn’t limited. It isn’t a rare compound that can only be found by employing dextrous Indonesian children to ruck through the droppings of a rare pacific sea weasel, scrabbling through the acrid muck in search of just one elusive, glittering nugget of hope. It’s a state of mind, something that you can inspire in others: but you won’t manage it if you keep shuddering on about how we’re all on the brink of disaster. If we change our tune, though, we might be in with a chance: TIME IS A PRECIOUS COMMODITY might be well and truly wedged into everybody’s heads, but there’s still a chance to change our metaphoric minds on the economy question. How about EUROPEAN MARKETS ARE DELICIOUS LOLLIPOPS or AMERICAN WORKERS ARE GODLIKE UBERMENSCH?

It doesn’t even need to be daft propaganda – just the absence of the usual doomladen fear-mongering might do the trick. Right now, the world is full of bankers and brokers hiding inside giant citadels of cash, guarding the gates to normality. They’re still a bit too scared to come out, but if we all settle down a bit and stop screeching for a second, we might be able to calm their skittish hearts and coax them back out. After all, they don’t need their make-believe fortresses any more than your goldfish do.