JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post  

There’s was something striking in this representation of Big Money and the Common People that reminded me of other inverted pyramids. The weight of debt image appears on the back cover of what might well be an Outsider approach to reorganizing society, created  by William H. Smyth and surfaced in a number of slim pamphlets in the 1920’s and ’30’s. Smyth is all but forgotten save for the word he coined–“Technocracy”–which itself is not too-well remembered; Technocracy itself was a form of (somehow) democratic form of government ruled by engineers and scientists, and so on, who would somehow relieve us all of the tremendous burden of national debt.  And since this particular pamphlet Technocracy Explained by its Originator William H. Smyth (and then re-titled on the next page as Technocracy by its Originator Reorganization of National Energy Aim of Theory [sic] was printed in 1933 in a particularly bad year of the Great Depression, Smyth might have attracted a number of other-involved citizens who were now paying attention for some sort of anything that might relieve society of its monetary golem. 

In any event, the image on the rear cover was pretty striking, though I can’t find reference to it in the text (even though there is a reference here to this book itself, a piece of advertising in the book that someone has already found and perhaps purchased). It reminds me slightly of something else, a popular renaissance depiction of Dante’s inferno, by Sandro Botticelli:

[Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sandro_Botticelli_-_La_Carte_de_l%27Enfer.jpg]

It is common to see the Inferno structured this way, as is the depiction of debt heaped on the back of ordinary people, another inverted pyramid–now that I said that, I can’t think of another image. That said, I know it has nothing to do with the pyramid on the U.S. one dollar bill, as that didn’t make its first appearance for another two years after the Smyth paper. So there’s that.