Waking up: freeing ourselves from work

 

Chapter V: The Plan (Part 3)

"Seeing Reality" - ii

 

 

 

"Seeing Reality" - ii

 

Which brings me to another model that seems to reflect an “alternative consciousness,” a way to transform our social arrangements in a more equitable direction. I heard about it from a listener who called in to the radio program Sunday Sedition with Andrea Lewis, on our local Pacifica station, KPFA. He encouraged us all to check out “the Zeitgeist Movement,” and its’ associated “Venus Project.”

So I did.

Here’s a sufficient mouthful to give you a taste – from its online document “Designing the Future” (© 2007 by Jacque Fresco and Roxanne Meadows of The Venus Project, Inc., 78 pages):

Previous generations left a legacy of exploitation… [At] the heart of human progress – or destruction – is the rock-solid foundation of science…
Armed conflict…to settle differences…is now totally unacceptable… Suppose you were called upon to redesign planetary civilization without any limitations based on how things are done today. The goal is to help rid the world of war, poverty, hunger, and environmental degradation, and to create the best world for all inhabitants, given the resources at hand, for the longest period of time. (p. 6)

Then it gives us “a little background before considering this challenge,” and tells us to think about how the current system addresses car accidents, transportation systems, food, clothing, shelter, and material goods, and concludes:

One would think that with our technology we could eliminate most social ills. Couldn’t modern technology supply enough food, clothing, shelter, and material goods for all if used intelligently? What is stopping us from achieving this? …A majority of scientists think that the human race is on a “collision course” with nature… Worldwide more than one billion people currently live below the international poverty line… The gap between the rich and the poor is widening… With the advances of science and technology over the last two hundred years…does it have to be this way?
What is needed is…an alternative vision for a sustainable new world civilization, unlike any in the past.
…How are decisions arrived at in a cybernated resource-based society? …To answer this question, we use the scientific method and have computers get direct feedback from the environment. Computers would have electrical sensors extended into all areas of the social complex around the globe…for example…monitoring the water table, insects, pests, plant diseases, soil nutrients, and so forth. Decisions are then arrived at using direct feedback from the environment… One can think of this as a global autonomic nervous system… As we transition to a fully cybernated process of governing human affairs, newer technologies can be installed that remove human error. These machines would provide information rather than opinions, thus considerably reducing the influence of bias and irrationality or purely emotional elements in how affairs are managed. This way people play less and less of a role in decision-making and the society is working toward AI and machine decision-making to manage all resources, serving the common good…With the scientific understanding that behavior is subject to the same natural laws that govern other processes, the education system in the resource-based economy can evolve…
The aim of this new social design is to encourage a new incentive, one that is no longer directed toward the shallow and self-centered goals of wealth, property, and power. These new incentives encourage people toward self-fulfillment and creativity…
Unburdened by survival concerns, people would have time for individual interests such as continuing their education…theater, photography, painting, ballet, …new horizons open up… (p. 9, 10, 11, 69-70, 72, 74, 75)

In a section entitled, “How Resources are Distributed Equitably,” we learn that there will be no money. Instead, we will be given “distribution centers:”

There would be 3-D flat-screen imaging in each home. If you desired an item, an order would be placed and the item automatically delivered…without a price tag, servitude, or debt of any kind. This would include whatever people need in the way of housing, clothing, education, health care, entertainment, etc…. Raw materials for production can be transported directly to manufacturing facilities by automated transport “sequences” using boats, monorails, mag-lev trains, pipelines, and pneumatic tubes… (p. 76)

Sounds great. Who builds all this glorious automated stuff?

Only in literally the very last paragraph (on page 78) we learn that: “Shorter workdays would provide greater opportunities for family members to pursue areas of personal interest.”

 

So the workday will be “shorter” – but we will still be “workers.”

It’s impossible to know just by reading the document whether Jacque Fresco and Roxanne Meadows are naive about ‘Power,’ or being used by ‘Power.’ You may rest assured, however, that it’s one or the other.

Using the lens of our theory of wholism, however, red lights are flashing all over the place, primarily because the sticky questions are not asked. Assuming the very best about Jacque Fresco and Roxanne Meadows, what they’re proposing is going in the exact wrong direction. We don’t need even further disconnection from our earth.

What’s really sad, and scary, is that it does hit all the right notes of our dissonance, of all our dissatisfaction and pain. It knows how unhappy we are, how exhausted and frustrated… And it knows how wowed we are by the electronic toys. They know that the world they dangle before our tired but yet endlessly hopeful spirits is tempting. They know how this futuristic tale of time and ease would sound to overworked people dominated by technology, and who feel, therefore, correspondingly powerless – unable to influence, let alone create, our own environments. In short, it’s very effective at deflecting dissent, which makes me suspicious of its intent.

Despite the title of one section being, “How are decisions arrived at in a cybernated resource-based society?” there is no mention of the problem of ‘Power.’ Jacque Fresco is a scientist, and for him all questions resolve themselves into questions of “logic.” But ‘Power’ is not about ‘logic.’ ‘Reason’ is just a con podrunks found lying around and made use of, one of many tools (like ‘Race’) they picked up and used. But they would no more turn control over how the world is organized to “the scientists,” than they would to “the people,” unless of course “the scientists” are just their paid stooges – or partners in crime.

And so his reply – “let the computers decide” – to the question “who makes the decisions?” is nonsensical, a non-answer that forces us to do a little circle dance with him while we try to pin him down, to force him to admit that he has no idea who will make the hard decisions, because ‘Power’ is not a factor in his calculations.

I remember the friendly argument I had with my son about the animated film Wall•E. I was put off by the propaganda that machines could, in theory, do everything.

Huh? Machines pick the coffee beans, the cashews, assemble those ever tinier electronic components? Machines remove the coltan from the earth, and the people from their land?

The same questions arose when I looked at all the imagined massive structures that dominate Fresco’s document. Who builds this futuristic vision?

And what if I don’t want my turn at the oar? What if I want out of the galley altogether? What will you do with me? Banish me to a house with no “3-D flat-screen imaging?”

And who are “you” anyway? Who are the ‘bosses’ in this “redesigned planetary civilization?” If you avoid the sticky questions, on some level, it’s a con.

Been there, done that, sick of the masks, sick of the lies. Poof, be gone!

 

But I so understand the urge to ‘fix’ things. We good-hearted folks look at the mess the podrunks have made of our world, and we think, “there’s gotta be a better way.” And, depending on our backgrounds, our talents and gifts, we put on the table our best guess for a plausible fix. Me, too – “guilty as charged” – I admit it.

There’s a bit of Peterkin in this attempt, however, in the sincerity and naïveté of it – so I call it “The Peterkin Problem.”

We do have different values. We are good-hearted. It’s hard for many of us to believe the podrunks are as cold-blooded as they truly are because we tend to judge others by ourselves. So different groups among us apply their various talents to the problem of how to fix this system – resulting in a kind of piecemeal, patchwork application of bandages to a vampire that breathes again only to go for our throats.

We’re gonna need an awful penetrating perception to wash away all the Peterkin.

Did you ever read The Peterkin Papers?

This was Mrs. Peterkin.
It was a mistake. She had poured out a delicious cup of coffee, and, just as she was helping herself to cream, she found she had put in salt instead of sugar! It tasted bad. What should she do? Of course she couldn’t drink the coffee; so she called in the family, for she was sitting at a late breakfast all alone. The family came in; they all tasted, and looked, and wondered what should be done, and all sat down to think.
At last Agamemnon, who had been to college, said, “Why don’t we go over and ask the advice of the chemist?” (For the chemist lived over the way, and was a very wise man.)
Mrs. Peterkin said, “Yes,” and Mr. Peterkin said, “Very well,” and all the children said they would go too. So the little boys put on their India-rubber boots, and over they went.
…[The chemist] listened as calmly as he could to the story…At first he said he couldn’t do anything about it; but when Agamemnon said they would pay in gold if he would only go, he packed up his bottles in a leather case, and went back with them all.
First he looked at the coffee, and then stirred it. Then he put in a little chlorate of potassium, and the family tried it all round; but it tasted no better. Then he stirred in a little bichlorate of magnesia. But Mrs. Peterkin didn’t like that. Then he added some tartaric acid and some hypersulphate of lime. But no, it was no better. “I have it!” exclaimed the chemist, – “a little ammonia is just the thing!” No, it wasn’t the thing at all.
Then he tried each in turn some oxalic, cyanic, acetic, phosphoric, chloric, hyperchloric, sulphuric, boracic, silicic, nitric, formic, nitrous nitric, and carbonic acids. Mrs. Peterkin tasted each, and said the flavor was pleasant, but not precisely that of coffee. So then he tried a little calcium, aluminum, barium, and strontium, a little clear bitumen, and a half of a third of a sixteenth of a grain of arsenic. This gave rather a pretty color; but still Mrs. Peterkin ungratefully said it tasted of anything but coffee. The chemist was not discouraged. He put in a little belladonna and atropine, some granulated hydrogen, some potash, and a very little antimony, finishing off with a little pure carbon. But still Mrs. Peterkin was not satisfied.
The chemist said that all he had done ought to have taken out the salt. The theory remained the same, although the experiment had failed. Perhaps a little starch would have some effect. If not, that was all the time he could give. He should like to be paid, and go. They were all much obliged to him, and willing to give him $1.371/2 in gold. …But there was the coffee! (Lucretia P. Hale, “The Lady Who Put Salt in Her Coffee,” The Peterkin Papers)

For reasons already discussed, those who are unconsciously complicit generally end up trying to “save capitalism from itself.” This pattern is set in early childhood, when we’re conditioned to try to save our parents from themselves. Superheroes-all we serve diligently the cause of saving ‘Power.’ Children kept insecure cannot help but identify with those who wield power over their lives.

That it’s understandable will be of little consolation when we’re waving goodbye successively to one species after another, and to whole groups of people, one after the other.

Screw that.

I’m for saving ourselves – all of us – and for making sure the podrunks and the capitalist world-system are well and truly bound – to each other and to a boulder called (à la Randall) “The Reckoning” – and sinking them both together. But only a clear, fearlessly frank assessment of what these vampires are will enable us to form ourselves into an effective ‘Counter.’ The suffering of our brothers and sisters who bring us the toys and the coffee cheap can no longer be just passively repudiated. Because podrunks think strategically and unequivocally, we can no longer afford not to.

 

The wholeness we had once was like that delicious cup of coffee. It allowed us to anticipate each day with relish, savor each taste. It warmed and stimulated us. And just as we were about to make it even better – sharing stories and knowledge across cultures, becoming more playful with our survival strategies, intensifying the pleasure and pregnancy of living fully – just as we were about to add that cream and sugar, the podrunks stayed our hand and poured in salt instead.

If we weren’t so good-hearted, if they hadn’t slipped some sedatives into the pot, we would have realized sooner that our world had been hopelessly fouled, and our wholeness stolen.

But we are good-hearted and we have been sedated. So instead of saying, “screw this,” and throwing out their toxic brew, we keep trying to fix it, to “make it work.” We accepted their ‘Reason’ as our own, accepted their linear thinking as ‘intelligence,’ organized ourselves into the neat boxes they wanted… and we worked, and we worked, and we worked, until soaring productivity levels, and a planet raped beyond belief, now threatens massive die-offs within our species, and whole species without.

 

Before we wake up, when we remain in the dream, we are Peterkins-all, trying one thing after another to try and enjoy our cup of coffee, what had once been our freedom. It’s time to toss what they’ve been forcing down our throats, and start a fresh pot.

 

And only a truly oppositional set of values can brew up something fresh enough to shake off the death grip of this dying system.

Knowing that our impoverishment was accomplished by disconnecting us from our sources of power – the ancestors, the earth, and each other – means that reestablishing these connections is, in its barest bones, The Plan. Because of their subtle intertwinements, returning to one source eventually branches into the others…if we travel with consciousness, which we are.

Right now our lives are oriented around values we had no say in. To grow the future that our children deserve we must re-orient our lives around values that we consciously choose.

Two things must be very clear at the outset: the seriousness of the podrunks, and the enormity of the threat they pose to all life. It’s critical that we don’t delude ourselves about reality – not about how they think, and not about how ‘change’ happens.

They look at automation and conclude we need less people. We absolutely don’t matter to them. Cannon fodder, prison slave-labor, and early graves are the paths they’ve planned for us, we that ‘Power’ deems superfluous. And embracing a truly oppositional value system means we don’t leave any of our brothers or sisters behind.

‘Power’ is very organized, with a very clear and simple aim: “stay ahead of the people, and stay on top.” They are perfectly willing to let the “real economy” crash (what’s left of it, after they took the money and ran *), sacrifice potential ‘profits,’ in order to secure greater control over…essentially, us. What they cannot sacrifice, therefore, is perpetual war, technological domination, and media control. And they have who-knows-how-many almost-infinitely-funded think-tanks devoted just to maintaining that control.

Now what is the effective counter to that – to their single-minded focus on keeping ‘the people’ under control?

Is it: “Power-down plans”? “Single-payer universal health care”? “A sixty-vote, filibuster-proof majority in the Senate”?

You see our problem. Our good hearts and our diversity in skills and talents, and our lack of unity, lead us to try to ‘fix’ a system (in ways as various as our gifts) constituted to crush and control us.

And though it seems that “our goodness” itself is the problem, that’s only because we’re still swimming in that same old polluted cup of coffee.

The only way to counter their fixed, determined, aim to ride our backs is, just as the Reverend Doctor told us, to straighten them, and go make ourselves a fresh pot.

And the only way to make a fresh pot is to meet determination with determination. We must refuse. We must tell ‘Power’ in the clear script of our conduct, “our backs don’t exist for you anymore. They are for us, and our dreams.” Period.

From Day One they have used our ‘goodness’ against us, our good hearts, the fact that we care, our willingness to save capitalism from itself. I’m not suggesting we should stop having good hearts – just open eyes, and a re-conceived allegiance.

 

It’s important that we not ignore Marcuse’s warnings about the tendency of ‘Power’ to turn everything into itself – the “Mr. Smith Virus.” Our ancestors figured out and packaged for us all we need to know to begin advocating for our future. Now is the time to pay attention. Unless the “alternative consciousness” we cleave to takes the “Mr. Smith Virus” problem seriously, it’s only a matter of time before that ‘alternative’ gets directed back into elitism (the division between the “thinkers” and the “manual labor,” the ladders, the competition, the looking to ‘Power’ for approval, the inevitable leaving of some of us behind to fend for ourselves).

A truly oppositional consciousness asks the hard questions: how will work will be organized differently? In the world you want, are there still bosses? Hierarchy?

And if work isn’t organized differently, if there is still hierarchy, still bosses, what’s the point? How will we build a mass movement if we don’t address the concerns of the masses of people globally?

The folks in the Transition Movement suggest that we start, just start, and work out the problems as we go. I agree that just starting is critical, but we can’t make a leap of consciousness without solid ground to stand on. You have to have sound footing if you’re gonna jump.

So how do we inoculate ourselves against cooptation? How do we structure our opposition such that it can’t be undermined or subverted? Those questions cannot be faced unless you understand ‘Power.’

Read Jaded Tasks: Brass Plates, Black Ops, and Big Oil by Wayne Madsen when you need a reality check. It reminds us again, as Machiavelli did, how the little boys pretending to be gods think and behave – which is without conscience or scruple.

As I write this, the journalist Seymour Hersh is reporting that his sources have revealed the existence of a hit squad responsible only to then Vice-President Dick Cheney. This revelation then made it safe for left economist Catherine Austin Fitts to admit that she’d been the target of an assassination plot.

Wayne Madsen writes about a series of questionable “suicides” in Jaded Tasks. And the recent “accidental death” of Mike Connell, described as “Karl Rove’s computer guru,” the man who designed the “man in the middle” computer architecture that allowed the right-wing crazies to rig voting machines and steal elections, just as he was being deposed to testify against Rove, is but one of the more high-profile examples of the ruthlessness of ‘Power.’ * Only the very tip of their malice ever comes to light. One shudders to imagine the whole of it.

‘Power’ will not be concerned about the Transition Movement unless, against expectations, it touches some critical nerve – and then disaster will strike, sending folks scurrying, off-balance and backwards (unless they’ve tucked ‘consciousness’ in their pocket). When you tinker with the toenails of an economic system, that’s one thing, but when you dangle a stake over its heart – either its raison d'être or a key strategic location, a source of major profits or control – that’s something else again. And when you challenge the game itself…well…but we have to, what else is there?

 

The game itself, the system – the whole enchilada – rests on an absence, requiring a magician’s cunning to keep our eyes from seeing. The absence is us. We’ve gone into hiding. Our true selves linger in some Lost Lake of Limbo, waiting for the circumstances that will allow emergence into consciousness.

As I write these words, a tiny fruit-fly has come to his final rest on the edge of my computer, staring at me. The black of his little body is beginning to grow dull, but his wings, though folded close together in prayer, still glisten with iridescence.

To all the other living beings of this planet we non-tribal humans are the greatest question of all. Barry Lopez, in his Arctic Dreams, recalls:

A Yup’ik hunter on Saint Lawrence Island once told me that what traditional Eskimos fear most about us is the extent of our power to alter the land, the scale of that power, and the fact that we can easily effect some of these changes electronically, from a distant city. Eskimos, who sometimes see themselves as still not quite separate from the animal world, regard us as a kind of people whose separation may have become too complete. They call us, with a mixture of incredulity and apprehension, “the people who change nature.” (p. 34)

But we are animals. To pretend otherwise, to suppress all that is nature in us, means that we live an insane illusion, staking out for ourselves an artificial, manufactured middle ground that cannot support souls. So we put on our false faces, our masks, and act as if souls are optional, or ‘primitive’ – that we are ‘smarter’ for having shed them, because, having shed them, there are no constraints on our behavior. The only god is ‘Mind’ and ‘Mind’ don’t mind if you rape the planet – or your fellow men and women. Au contraire.

We are only as good as the system we surround ourselves with. A system that can’t support souls is a system without values. A truly oppositional theory, therefore, is simultaneously, in its essence, a system of oppositional values, a value system – and a value system self-reinforces.

 

When you’re an electrical apprentice you have to study electrical theory. After eight hours of hard physical toil it can be hard to justify the time this requires. I remember one journeyman telling me that, as electrical apprentices and journeymen, we are essentially mechanics. Though we do have to do the calculations on our own “side jobs,” on the commercial jobs, we, basically, install the raceways, do the rough-in, run the wire, etc. – i.e. we’re manipulating objects with our hands. Mechanics.

But we apprentices dutifully applied our minds to the theory part anyway (like we had any choice), starting with “Ohm’s Law,” which states: “the flow of current in an electric circuit is proportional to the applied voltage and inversely proportional to the resistance.”

I = E/R, in which:

• I = the current flow in amperes;

• E = the applied voltage in volts; and

• R = the circuit resistance in Ohms.

 

What a formula tells you is that each factor can be expressed in terms of the other factors. So I decided that we were really looking at one thing from three different angles, that: current is really a manifestation of voltage and resistance, etc. etc. (Of course the teachers all told us to imagine water and water pressure and all that, and that’s usually the image that gets locked in people’s minds.) But to confuse matters further, David Bodanis tells us (Electric Universe) that: “The individual electrons barely travel – in fact, they drift along…slowly, barely at walking speed… [In reality, the voltage] shakes the electrons that are already waiting…” – after that I was really confused.

Anyway, point being – a system refers to itself like Ohm’s Law. So we see with the capitalist system that “the family” is a manifestation of “the state” and “the market,” …etc. etc. etc. And, circularly, they all reinforce each other again.

And a system (like this one we got, this podrunk one), that is amoral, that springs from no values, can only be effectively countered by a system that is, essentially, intrinsically, inter-woven values.

The theory of wholism is truly oppositional because it confronts capital, a truly soulless system, with a system of inter-woven, mutually-reinforcing, values. Reverence for the earth is a manifestation of reverence for the ancestors in conversation with our living brothers and sisters. Wholism is about relationships of mutually-reinforcing reverence. Each angle can be expressed in terms of the others.

So our relationships with each other, in order to constitute an effective counter to ‘Power,’ have to become a living expression of oppositional values – a set of inter-woven values that become our ‘sine qua nons,’ our ‘without-which-nots,’ always present in our pockets, never forgotten, never lost – so that our actions:

 

• Acknowledge and redeem the suffering and sacrifice of our ancestors and ourselves;

• Replenish and revere the earth, including the earth in our own bodies;

• Honor our responsibility to each other, leave no one behind – “each one, free one,” “all of us, or none.”

 

These values, always with us, never forgotten, inform our actions. These values penetrate and saturate, and allow us to make our mass movement our unified consciousness, and vice versa.

As long as we address the problem of a soulless system piecemeal, separating out single strands of the system, never challenging the loom, we can be contained and co-opted. As long as we keep attacking bits and pieces of the problem – on their turf rather than from the perspective of an alternative set of values – our dissent can be ‘managed,’ our critique contained – and we with it.

 

If we continue packaging our dissent, it’s like staying in boxes marked with big red Xs, waiting to be picked off serially in a sequence assigned according to the threat podrunks imagine we pose. The only ultimate solution is group withdrawal from soullessness, and if we prepare for the long haul, we will get there.

 

 

Continue to "The Plan" - Part 4

 

 

© Pamela Satterwhite for Nas2EndWork (the NEW)