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With this issue, we initiate a new section which, after consultation with our Greek experts, we have decided to call ANYSTOPIA. The word is thus of our own coinage and is taken from the Greek words anys(practicable, possible) + topia (world).Not UTOPIA (an ideal world that can never be realized). Not DYSTOPIA (an unwished world). But ANYSTOPIA (an ideal world that can be realized. a practicable world.)

The artist American Kathleen Muldoon recounted a story to us, one day in a café in Copenhagen, about a moment of illumination she experienced when visiting The Chicago Options Exchange (CBOE). Such moments occur to writers, artists, musicians and that fictitious assemblage we designate as “normal people”. Carson McCuller's describes such a moment when she was writing The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Pacing back and forth she experience what she herself thought was a moment of illumination. She realized- in a flash- that the main character of her book, Singer, was....mute.

Perhaps we live in a time when there is a break in the ice, so to speak. A moment of possible illumination. There is much talk, these days, of “crisis” (literally the decisive point in the progress of a fever when it becomes clear the patient will either live or die) and of the imminent peril of financial institutions and what we fondly call our “way of life”. It might make sense to sit back for a moment and consider what kind of world we might want to create. What kind of achievable world we want to live in. Because, after all, in a free society we are the ones who get to choose.

And thus one might ask basic questions and try to come up with some practicable suggestions.

One might ask, for example, what is a bank? Does it absolutely have to be a profit-making enterprise with stock-holders who expect a return on their profit? Or might it be a kind of fund that would finance things a society might consider as desirable? Would such a thing be possible? Would such a thing be practicable?

Or what is learning? Is it to be linked necessarily to “training”.

Or crime. Is it a juridical or a medical problem?

There are many other possible topics of discussion, and The Copenhagen Review thinks that this is time to consider some of them.

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So let us begin with Kathleen Muldoon's response to the editor's request that she tell us what happened to her that day, not so many years ago.

“Dear Anystopia,

Studying “business” at an American university, I was given a glimpse of a world I had never imagined. It was like scratching the surface of thick glass and realizing that peering into it and penetrating it are two very different things. Most fascinating, was the attempt to understand, to quantify, so as to be able to predict, the countless ways people respond to money and the things it can buy. As students, we learned that when newscasters use terms like “consumer confidence” and “market expectations,” they are talking about what real people, millions and millions of them, think and hope and fear: Are people feeling scared? Wary? Invincible? All of these emotional responses are reflected in the behavior of the markets. And this behavior is visible to anyone who knows how to read the signs.

This was the age of men and women in power suits, the time (1990's) of “greed is good.” Students of finance studied money, then, the way theology students study God. We learned to recognize the signs and to read the wisdom of the financial world's most inspired teachers. Many of my classmates, having grown up among the faithful, knew the names of the saints. They had heard the sermons. They had sung the hymns. And they believed they were following an oral precept that commanded: I came to seek knowledge, not the truth.

And yet, though I gathered things along the way, I remained a sojourner in a foreign land. Not so much a convert, as an observer who was simply curious. Thus it was with great interest I signed up for a school trip to Chicago, meant to include a tour of the Chicago Mercantile Board and the Chicago Board Options Exchange. The CBOE functions much as does the New York Stock Exchange. One difference is that members trade, not stocks, but commodities (wheat, corn, gold, etc.) and contracts for the future sale or purchase of these commodities.

The day of my visit, the trading floor of the CBOE looked much like the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. After a tour of the building and an informative talk by a member of the exchange, we were led to an observation room overlooking the trading floor. We then watched as the clock slowly ticked away the last few minutes of the trading day.

Just like in the movies, the pace of activity on the trading floor below us grew more frenzied as the closing bell neared. Arms waved and papers flew into the air as the hand of the clock approached the appointed hour. In a split second of what can only be described as illumination, the magnitude of what I was watching became apparent to me: each piece of paper represented a trade being executed, one by one. Every trade represented thousands of dollars, or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or even more. Every minute of every hour of every trading day, masses of people were moving massive amounts of money back and forth. The sheer volume of money changing hands before my eyes was overwhelming.

And I was overwhelmed too. That is, until I realized what was really happening: nothing. Nothing was really happening. No money was changing hands. No bars of gold bullion were being bought or sold. No contracts for the future delivery of corn were being signed. Outside of that enormous space, life in the physical world was going on just as it had a moment before. And yet within the space I was observing, nothing was taking place.

Nothing but consensus. I was watching a market that functioned solely on the basis of an agreement among it’s participants, which included banks, journalists, investors and many others. And what they all agreed upon was simply this: that something actually was happening there. The participants and much of what we call “the world” had agreed to agree that these men waving, in the air, hastily written notes were in fact exchanging money for gold and corn and contracts on behalf of farmers and factories and investors the world over. It was a fiction, if you will.