Waking up: freeing ourselves from work

Chapter V: The Plan (Part 1)

Preface

Preface

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf, and the young lion, and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. (Isaiah 11:6)

 

It is now possible to give every man, woman and child on Earth a standard of living comparable to that of a modern-day billionare. This is not an opinion or a hope – it is an engineeringly demonstrable fact. This can be done using only the already proven technology, and with the already mined, refined, and recirculating physical resources. (R. Buckminster Fuller)

 

I learned this, at least…that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him…In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them. (Henry David Thoreau)

To begin organizing our own lives we have to have a picture of ‘freedom,’ some ideas for how to get there, a belief that we can get there – and then we have to head on down the road, never forgetting to put ‘consciousness’ in our pocket.

We begin by shaking off inertia and picking up ‘trust’ – one thing does indeed lead to another.

And we’ve already begun.

There are many movements under way that challenge the hoarding of ‘Power’ for the few – but we don’t yet have a mass movement; and it is only a mass movement that can supercede ‘Power’ and usher in a new world based on freedom, on freely-associating people – people who cooperate without coercion of any kind.

Tesla had given the matter considerable thought when he concluded that, “every effort under compulsion demands a sacrifice of life-energy.” Your own experience corroborates his observation I’m sure. But we have a system based on force, and every social institution within it is patterned on coercion. Stillness is forced on babies when they want to move. Silence is forced on children when they want to speak. Adolescents are hammered in seats when their bodies itch for release. Adults are told what do to when they hunger to think. We are nature but we’ve stopped listening to nature speak in our bodies.

There’s a mindset to exorcise, a commercial imperative that refuses to see, to recognize, life.

Instead, everywhere it looks it sees a mirror: “How does this serve ME? What’s in it for ME?”

But nature doesn’t speak in individualisms – it speaks in relationships, in the call-and-response: “I seed you – I feed you” – because we are all in this together.

And though we knew this once, the commercial imperative, the abandoned child, intervened and changed all that. The narrow cell of the self became the only reference. As Polanyi pointed out, human solidarity was “stoically” renounced. He quotes here an 18th century Dick Cheney:

“Hunger will tame the fiercest animals, it will teach decency and civility, obedience and subjection, to the most perverse. In general it is only hunger which can spur and goad them [the poor] on to labor; yet our laws have said they shall never hunger. The laws, it must be confessed, have likewise said, they shall be compelled to work. But then legal constraint is attended with much trouble, violence and noise; creates ill will, and never can be productive of good and acceptable service: whereas hunger is not only peaceable, silent, unremitting pressure, but, as the most natural motive to industry and labor, it calls forth the most powerful exertions; and, when satisfied by the free bounty of another, lays lasting and sure foundations for good will and gratitude. The slave must be compelled to work but the free man should be left to his own judgment, and discretion; should be protected in the full enjoyment of his own, be it much or little; and punished when he invades his neighbor’s property,” (William Townsend, Dissertation on the Poor Laws, 1786, inveighing against the minimal support England offered the ‘poor,’ quoted in Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, p. 113-4)

Polanyi commented on this by adding, “Here was a new starting point for political science. By approaching human community from the animal side, Townsend by-passed the supposedly unavoidable question as to the foundations of government; and in doing so introduced a new concept of law into human affairs, that of the laws of Nature.”

It’s ironic that the subtitle of Townsend’s dissertation was: “A Well-Wisher of Mankind.” Methinks he dost protest too much. Interesting, though, that he felt the need to. I suppose, no one can be a demon in their own eyes, unless they take pride in being one (Cheney again comes to mind).

“Hunger is not only peaceable, silent, unremitting pressure, but, as the most natural motive to industry and labor, it calls forth the most powerful exertions…” – imagine forming that sentence in your mouth. Another discriminator.

Though no law constrained the laborer to serve the farmer, nor the farmer to keep the landlord in plenty, laborers and farmers acted as if such compulsion existed. By what law was the laborer ordained to obey a master, to whom he was bound by no legal bond? What force kept the classes of society apart as if they were different kinds of human beings? And what maintained balance and order in this human collective which neither invoked nor even tolerated the intervention of political government? …The biological nature of man appeared as the given foundation of a society that was not of a political order. Thus it came to pass that economists presently relinquished Adam Smith’s humanistic foundations, and incorporated those of Townsend. …Economic society had emerged as distinct form the political state. (Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 115)

The reality of ‘Power’ was disappeared into “the natural order of things.” “Force is ‘natural.’” Bullyishness was defended as a virtue, rapacity as sagacity – and this mess, this sugarcoated greed – yet another con (“Social Darwinism") – became the central propaganda piece in the podrunk “confuse and conquer” jigsaw.

“Greed is the ‘natural’ way.” “It is our human nature to be rapacious bullies.” This was what Cheney meant when he told Congressman Inslee, “You just don’t understand economics.”

Humanity must perforce prey on itself, like monsters of the deep. (William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act IV, Scene II)

This system forces human beings to treat other human beings and their own bodies as objects at the disposal of the economy, ‘Power’ being its own justification. Those who enforce it guide their actions by the principal: “if you grab ’em by the short hairs you can lead them anywhere.” “With fear, you can make them ignore nature” – i.e. our natural inclinations and our reverence for the earth as a whole.

From this, the guiding principle of ‘force,’ sensitive minds recoil – as do their bodies…into early graves.

But it’s time to strip this mindset bare, the peculiar logic of the abandoned child, to see the gaping wound it conceals…and to move on.

However, as we begin, it’s essential that we don’t delude ourselves into thinking that the grasping hand will relax simply because we gently place within it the common sense that in destroying the planet we destroy ourselves. It’s time to stop wondering about the vampires, to stop asking, “how do they sleep at night? Don’t they care about their souls?” It’s time to stop expecting that, with better information – “But it was perfectly predictable that unrestrained usury and investing in bloated credit default swaps and bubbling derivatives would sink the economy! Why would they destroy themselves?” “Surely they can see that it’s way more cost-effective to send the incarcerated to college for $40,000 a year than to lockups!” “Why can’t they grasp that universal, single-payer healthcare benefits everybody, even business?” – they will make more ‘rational’ decisions.

And it’s definitely time to stop taking what they say seriously – for example, all that crap about “bringing democracy to the Middle East” – I mean, Machiavelli’s told us how they think already, and podrunks as a class don’t change. They are as grasping and single-focused on greed, force and control today as they ever were. It simply doesn’t merit our time, this parsing of their official statements to figure out their intentions. Recall what Machiavelli said:

…It is necessary…to be skilful in simulating and dissembling. But men are so simple, and governed so absolutely by their present needs, that he who wishes to deceive will never fail in finding willing dupes. …It is not essential…that a Prince should have all the good qualities which I have enumerated [mercy, good faith, integrity, humanity, and religion], …but it is most essential that he should seem to have them…

To podrunks it is a virtue to be skillful in deception. This is one of the key ways they differ from the winds from below, for whom honesty is a virtue. So when Mark Crispin Miller, for example, analyzes Bush’s rhetoric for evidence of a persecution complex – “we’re tracking down terrorists who hate America one by one” * – he does not serve the cause of ‘waking up.’

Rather than waste time with their words, we should thank Machiavelli for his ‘heads-up’ and focus on what podrunks do, always assuming that the results you see around you are the results they intended (as they are very organized, and we are not – yet).

When we have no illusions about how they think – which is pretty straightforward and crude for the most part – we can better understand why the country is in such a shambles. They think “automation” and deduce: “we need less people.” And from “we need less people” it is easy to rationalize: “imperial adventures,” “prison-slave-labor,” “shortened life expectancies,” “inadequately funded public education” and the absence of “health care as a right.” They study the Great Depression, note that war ended labor militancy, and conclude that “perpetual war” (whether ‘foreign’ or ‘domestic’ is almost irrelevant) is essential to forestall the people’s ‘waking up.’ “Climate change? No problem. We need less people, chaos, and insecurity – it keeps us on top! Cool.” “High drop-out rates? Fine, that’s the point – we need cannon fodder and prison-slave-labor. And all the resulting crime keeps them turned against each other. A perfect storm!” “An illness industry that can’t provide health? Well, duh – it’s profitable and we need less people anyway.” I’m sure we could make a game of this, but it’s not in the least amusing.

And we must also have no illusions about what a President can do. I am immensely and forever grateful to Barack Obama for…it would be interesting to pause our discussion and finish this sentence – to examine the question of what it is he has precisely done. I find it irritating in the extreme the trivialization I hear from the left of what that is. But pursuing that fish would be a distraction from the present point: no President of the United States can bring us our future. His job will not allow it (not in the job description, folks, it really ain’t). He can save a few lives (and if it’s your life saved, that’s a huge deal), reduce the suffering, ameliorate the distress, he can buy time – but the future is up to us.

Continue to "The Plan" - Part 2

© Pamela Satterwhite for Nas2EndWork (the NEW)