IMAGINATION AND REALITY

"And what are we but our fathers' sons and daughters?  We are the Victorian legacy.  Our materialism, our lack of spirituality, our grossness, our mockery of art, our utilitarian attitude to education, even the dull grey suits wrapped around the dull grey lives of our eminent City men, are Victorian hand-me-downs.  Many of our ideas of history and society go back no further than Victorian England.  We live in a money culture because they did.  Control by plutocracy is a nineteenth-century phenomenon that has been sold to us as a blueprint for reality.  But what is real about the values of a money culture?
        

Money culture recognises no currency but its own.  Whatever is not money, whatever is not about making money, is useless to it.  The entire efforts of our government as directed through our society are efforts towards making more and more money.  This favours the survival of the dullest.  This favours those who prefer to live in a notional reality where goods are worth more than time and where things are more important than ideas. . .
        . . .Why have we submitted to a society that tries to make imagination a privilege when to each of us it comes as a birthright?"

                                                      -- JEANETTE WINTERSON
                                                                   "ART OBJECTS"