Tom Walker wrote:
>we have moved in the past 25 years since the "energy crisis" of the 1970s
into a system of perverse
>incentives that primarily REWARDS ENERGY WASTE and implicitly penalizes
>resource conservation.
This claim could be countered by Buckminster Fuller's notion of
'ephemeralisation' the doing of more and more with less and less, a process
already apparent to the Luddites. Nonetheless, even the Lovins duo at the
Rocky Mountains Institute known for their brilliant 'Factor 4' ideas that
speed us ever faster on the ephemeralisation trajectory, acknowledge that
'to heal our societies, create justice and restore the earth, we will need
to rethink fundamentally...etc' (p299, Factor 4)
Ephemeralisation applies also to people - more and more can be done with
less and less people. When treated as a dispensible 'human resource', in
a marketplace that offers one the right and exquisite freedom to neglect the
basic needs of others, one's post-downsizing need to survive ('earn a
living'), certainly motivates the human genius to invent ever new and
trivial products and services. Such genius warms the cockles of the market
faithful. The ethic of mutual dispensibility - an inherent aspect of
market morality - thus proves itself to be an extraordinary generator of
what Tom sees as waste (and what the market faithful see as a growing pie).
Ephemeralisation acting in combination with the ethic of mutual
dispensibility will ensure that human genius will increasingly work for
nothing (trivialisation), and more frenetically, at the expense of the
biosphere and mutual security. To give the econometric bean-counters
something to play with (and enumerate):
dispensability + ephemeralisation = trivialisation (distancing from basic
needs)
Well, as Tom points out, a CRIMINALLY INSANE economics. The irony is that
players caught up in the insanity, believing that they are truly 'working
for something' are likely to dismiss the suggestions that are both
'working for nothing' and 'getting everything for nothing', not to hear Ry
Cooder's song 'The farmer feeds us all'.
A language trap? A linguistically constructed prison for the criminally
insane? If there is any hope of escape it will clearly require a
fundamental confrontation with our old questions: what do we mean by work?
What is its purpose? How should we ( this is a moral or normative question)
differentiate between work and non-work? Can we escape the trap while
remaining chained to the word 'work' (ie, the deceptions of work/non-work
dichotomies.)?
Trapped? Consider the slippages in the meanings of the word work in Tom's
writings and his excerptions from Hubbert's essay. Even the most
intelligent among us get so caught in work's deceptions.
The moral dilemma of our age: how to achieve economic security and
ecological sustainability while maintaining the ethic/freedom of mutual
dispensibility?
>GETTING SOMETHING FOR NOTHING
>
>"In the distribution to the public of the products of industry, the failure
>of the present system is the direct result of the faulty premise upon which
>it is based. This is: that somehow a man is able by his personal services
to
>render to society the equivalent of what he receives, from which it follows
>that the distribution to each shall be in accordance with the services
>rendered and that those who do not work must not eat. This is what our
>propagandists call `the impossibility of getting something for nothing.'
>
>"Aside from the fact that only by means of the sophistries of lawyers and
>economists can it be explained how, on this basis, those who do nothing at
>all frequently receive the largest shares of the national income, the
simple
>fact is that it is impossible for any man to contribute to the social
system
>the physical equivalent of what it costs that system to maintain him from
>birth till death -- and the higher the physical standard of living the
>greater is this discrepancy. This is because man is an engine operating
>under the limitations of the same physical laws as any other engine. The
>energy that it takes to operate him is several times as much as any amount
>of work he can possibly perform. If, in addition to his food, he receives
>also the products of modern industry, this is due to the fact that material
>and energy resources happen to be available and, as compared with any
>contribution he can make, constitute a free gift from heaven.
>
>"Stated more specifically, it costs the social system on the North American
>Continent the energy equivalent to nearly 10 tons of coal per year to
>maintain one man at the average present standard of living, and no
>contribution he can possibly make in terms of the energy conversion of his
>individual effort will ever repay the social system the cost of his social
>maintenance. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that a distributive
>mechanism based upon so rank a fallacy should fail to distribute; the
marvel
>is that it has worked as well as it has.
>
>"Since any human being, regardless of his personal contribution, is a
social
>dependent with respect to the energy resources upon which society operates,
>and since every operation within a given society is effected at the cost of
>a degradation of an available supply of energy, this energy degradation,
>measured in appropriate physical units such as kilowatt-hours, constitutes
>the common physical cost of all social operations. Since also the
>energy-cost of maintaining a human being exceeds by a large amount his
>ability to repay, we can abandon the fiction that what one is to receive is
>in payment for what one has done, and recognize that what we are really
>doing is utilizing the bounty that nature has provided us. Under these
>circumstances we recognize that we all are getting something for nothing,
>and the simplest way of effecting distribution is on a basis of equality,
>especially so when it is considered that production can be set equal to the
>limit of our capacity to consume, commensurate with adequate conservation
of
>our physical resources."
>regards,
>
>Tom Walker
>http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/worksite.htm
Some further questions
What is meant here by 'doing nothing'?
How is it to be linguistically/politically decided whether a person is
'doing nothing'?
How does one convert (the subjective value of) one's individual effort/work
into energy units?
