A Message to the Middle Class on the Financing of: The Family Basic Income Proposal by Thomas Lunde August 27, 1998 There once was a race of people of high achievement who believed that the value of their Civilization arose from their relationship with the Sun. They made the Sun their God and sought prosperity in terms of favourable conditions for crops by devising ways to please this God. What started, perhaps by coincidence, was the idea that the Sun required human blood as a sign of commitment and loyalty to the blessing’s which this God could bestow. In time, human sacrifice became accepted as the highest form of worship and priests of this idea would select sons and daughters to be led to a stone altar from which their heart would be ripped from their still living chests. Anyone, parents, philosophers, brothers and sisters who might have felt this was erroneous were punished as they violated the accepted wisdom of tradition. Of course, there seemed much truth in these ghastly practices and for hundreds of years this civilization grew and prospered and they took this success to mean that their understanding of reality was right and it was just a matter of sacrificing more to achieve more. Perfectly logical! In fact any other ideas to explain the success of this civilization were considered irrational and illogical. This race was the Aztecs of ancient Mexico. Today, we view those ideas as cruel, evil, and the result of faulty thinking based on poor assumptions. And yet, with those ideas, a mighty civilization was built and sustained, great works of art produced, impressive feats of agriculture and irrigation developed, stable government and systems of law were successful, armies motivated individuals to sacrifice their lives to defend or expand these ideas. What is our Sun God? What erroneous idea have we extrapolated, perhaps by coincidence, into our form of worship, our truth, which perhaps, is blinding us and causing us as a culture, a civilization, to excesses that will become the seeds of our downfall? I will suggest it is the concept of the "work ethic" which has become our religion and to which we sacrifice our young in terms of demanding excessive sacrifice to prepare for the advancement of our civilization. Education, which used to have as the function, the development of our reasoning and thinking facilities has been redirected into vocational training to feed the God of Work. Our religion is the work ethic, our God is profit, money is our faith and those who currently profit are the members of the Church. Our high priests are the rich, our politicians and all those who profit from an increase in wages or rental income, dividends and business profits. And hell is poverty to which we give a token tribute and avoid those who have it like the plague. As I view this world, that has the capacity of overproduction, incredible wealth and health, I find the most atrocious ideas being defended. The concept that everyone should work, that work defines the citizen and those who don’t or can’t work must be punished, sacrificed, ostracized and marginalized, even though our factories, our farmers fields, our mines and forests are producing in great abundance. Enough abundance for all. Of course, everyone works, what is valued though is paid work, work that is done for profit and that is sustained by the concept of a market system of exchange. Housework, thinking, problem solving, cleanliness, child rearing, spiritual practices are not considered work in our limited perceptions, and because no profit can be made, this type of work is not considered work. Everyone works! The act of living can be said to be the act of working, we eat, we sleep, we dance and talk, we are constantly engaged in activities of the body and mind and yet in our society only certain kinds of activities are considered work - the rest discounted. And as a society, we have decided that only activities of a certain kind can be rewarded with our medium of exchange - that illusion we all choose to believe in called money - that we are led into falsehoods of reality.
