"Directly opposite, another door appeared in the blue wall. Victor crossed the courtyard to read what was written on it: 'Committee Against Financiers (CAF). All welcome.' Inside was another loggia in which a large crowd had gathered and were intensely listening to a lecture on the double invoicing of the goldsmiths, the evils of fractional reserve lending, and the need to return to 100% reserve cover backed by gold. It clearly had not occurred to the speaker that the way of life he was used to and which enabled him to live the way he did, would have to be given up if people did what he urged upon them. To deny credit creation is to stifle creativity. To constrain the banks is not the same thing as to develop independence from them. As he worked his audience with a great deal of plausible reasoning and carefully selected statistics about the effect of compound interest rates and the need to do away with interest, he was oblivious of Reason as she quietly made her exit from the room, obscured from the audience by the fog of rhetoric by which everyone was now surrounded.

One member of the audience did not quite understand the logic of the speaker's argument and said so. The speaker, irritated by the absence of congratulation in the question, replied with an answer that left the questioner unimpressed. But, like St. Exupery's 'Little Prince', he clung to his enquiry and asked his question again in a slightly different way. “I thought you were one of us,” the speaker rejoined, managing with this remark to turn the entire audience against the interlocutor. And then, like an embarrassed minister in lesser-governed countries than Columbia, he sought out a more flattering question from a fellow member of his committee. Victor remembered his training in the Academy of Humbug. Humbug, he had been taught on the first day, is one thing when given out by those who really understand monetary science. Its purpose is to keep that science as a province of experts. But it is another thing when proffered by those unschooled. Then it has the effect of making citizens believe they are experts, when in fact they may well have been better advised to remain with their lay understanding. 

More than ever, Victor now knew his task was to be scientific without the humbug, to show people how money really worked and to equip them with concepts, arrangements and even accounting systems that spoke the truth about money, so that through their monetary behavior they could become enlightened citizens. “If people took at face value the arguments of this speaker (not to mention those lined up to follow him), they would simply find themselves cut off from their will forces, chasing a strategy that could never be implemented because it understood neither history nor banking. It stirred the will against others, an easy thing to do in dysfunctional times. But that is not the kind of will needed if we would overcome the effects of self-willing.”

With these thoughts in his mind, Victor withdrew from the loggia, to the evident relief of the speaker, whose voice then became shriller as he moved on to the topic of elitism."