The current education system prepares people for a life of work and little else. Advertising and other media prepare them to be consumers. With a shorter work week people seem to wonder about meaning, why they are here, how to get along with others, etc. Existential issues. The sellers of widgets are only too happy to get us still more addicted to novelty in consumption and to have the dictates of fashion govern all of our purchases. While this might keep our minds off existential issues, this seems to be a trivial outcome for the human project and besides is not environmentally sustainable. So it seems that we will have to fall back on our selves on our own resources on our own coping skills.
If we are to go to a shorter work week or a guaranteed annual income we will have to move from educating people from making a living to *coping* with living. Coping skills have generally been learned on the street or in the schoolyard. Or, if learned too late, they are learned in some prison or other institution. Coping with living means self understanding and understanding others, understanding culture and the arts. Coping with everyday life. Well, you know what I mean. arthur -----Original Message----- From: Tom Walker [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, September 18, 2002 12:17 PM To: Charles Brass; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Immense productivity (was Re: 35-hour week scrapped Charles Brass wrote, > perhaps the most prominent reason why a reduced working week is not being > achieved is because human beings have a high desire to 'do something > productive' with their lives (and here I agree with Keith Hudson that at the > moment the most obvious way of knowing we have been productive is if we have > consumed more) and until we come up with better ways to let people feel > productive and useful (in sustainable ways) they will continue to be > 'addicted' to their job. Are you saying that people view their consumption as a score card for their usefulness? You may be interested in what Max Weber wrote about 100 years ago on this "score". "Since asceticism undertook to remodel the world and to work out its ideals in the world, material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history. To-day the spirit of religious asceticism -whether finally, who knows?- has escaped from the cage. But victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer. The rosy blush of its laughing heir, the Enlightenment, seems also to be irretrievably fading, and the idea of duty in one's calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs. Where the fulfillment of the calling cannot directly be related to the highest spiritual and cultural values, or when, on the other hand, it need not be felt simply as economic compulsion, the individual generally abandons the attempt to justify it at all. In the field of its highest development, in the United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the character of sport."
