Interesting how emotional you got about this Mike, I'm the one who works
without salary, goes from job to job and who must continually satisfy my
customers and can lose my entire business in a moment if one of my products
doesn't produce impeccably before thousands of people who will rate my work,
that is, if my product gives me credit for it. Why so emotional about
peanuts that in the ultimate scheme of things don't mean beans?
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Spencer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Friday, September 27, 2002 3:12 AM
Subject: Re: We have made income the enemy of wealth, long version.
>
> Ray wrote:
>
> > ...I don't see why simple widgit jobs should be so important while
> > jobs that involve the whole person are often forced to be done for
> > free.
> Mike answered;
> Because "jobs" describes a convetion for commoditizing human endeavor,
> reducing some fragment of it to predictability and then purchasing
> it for as little as the vendor will take.
Actually that is the old meaning of the word "job" as in the system of what
both of us do. But most people have "professions" and work on salary.
According to all of the capitalist economists I've read, the genius of the
system lies in two areas, 1. is private property and the other is in 2.
efficient distribution of products.
They try to make a case for superior innovation but real innovation is
usually very expensive and time consuming and is in a conflict of interest
with those who would not pay innovators to eat while they innovate. Also
the cost of serious research today is "through the roof." That is why
the arch capitalist Ronald Reagan did a government takeover of the research
for computer technology necessary for military hardware. Some fool had
allowed the government sponsored invention to be sold to Japan which has a
treaty with us that does not allow them to sell to governments for military
hardware and our jets were literally falling out of the sky as this
technology wore out. So Reagan formed the government/private corporation
Sema-tech and basically funded the research with government funds and gave
the results away to the private companies that agreed to cooperate for
little to nothing. Only governments can fund such research. There is no
instance in the entire world where a Chip-fab laboratory has been built by
private enterprise or capitalism. (Hederick Smith, "Rethinking America")
But I've said this before Mike. Is this a game with the "winner" based
upon who can repeat themselves the longest? A micro-chip may be the same
catagory as a widget in economics but in reality it deserves a whole
different catagory in the way that its development acts in real life values.
In spite of the hits on "complexity" recently on this list, that is the
difference between simple real estate that doesn't wear out (but only
changes function as its percieved function degenerates) and the research
on valuable tools which can make even the most durable land values go into
bankruptcy competing at any time in history. I remember my friend from
Frequency Electronics tossing a box of crystals that looked like contact
lenses into my lap. He said that the difference between those lenses that
were worthless and a $20,000 price tag on each one was a speck of dust that
made the lense useless in the Space program. We could call that a "speck
of land" that wasn't more valuable but could reduce value. An interesting
metaphor for all of the "classical economics" that we hear on this list.
What makes something truly valuable in the genius of the society is demeaned
and devalued by the "dirt" or "dust widget" theories of classical economics.
In a list that is concerned, according to its "mission statement" (can
you imagine a "missions statement" for a widgit?) with the future of "work"
I see no reason for the most mundane having the most value. Do you?
Only a Doctrinaire Capitalist or some other type of Western "ist" would
equate the simplicity of a great idea e.g. the theory of relativity with the
simplicity of a garden hoe or a wing nut. Both may have a process
connection but only the most simple minded stock broker or maybe some
classroom science teacher who is trying to get his "bumpkin" students from
the hoe to Einstein or maybe some classical or neo-classical economist
trying to "be scientific" would equate the value of the hoe to the value of
the theory of relativity in modern society. Frankly, the problem today
is not in getting people to hoe the ground or shovel food into their mouths.
The problem is in getting people to think and in stimulating the systems
that grow that kind of thought in the brain that creates innovations and a
valid future.
Only when threatened with war will the externally motivated capitalist rise
beyond the hoe and the hardware store that sells him that hoe. Today
Corporations are an endless theme and variations on that "hardware store."
I've heard the best researchers on Wall Street relate everything to that
"Hardware Store" metaphor. When they asked me to do the same with art and
voice teaching, I couldn't. There is no such simplicity. One read an
article in the Scientific American on the physiology of the voice and then
threw it in my face saying that it was the answer. I taught vocal
physiology in Universities and that was not what he was asking. But the
"hard wiring" convinced him that he knew the answer to teaching voice.
Even though the article itself said that it didn't know the difference
between a body that created great artistry and one that couldn't match
pitches. There education has taught them that Hard wiring and grazing in
areas that resemble their own belief systems are productive work whether
they "work" or not. What they really prefer to do is pillage, as in
napster or the former Soviet Union, or as they named the catagory their
social scientists invented to justify genocide on my people and culture:
"Hunt and Gather." This Capitalist system doesn't seem to work without
ruining a very large segment of its creative population that stimulates
future growth. One could make a case for an architypal form of sacrifice.
Not the physical death but the death of significance and human growth. As
if this death somehow made "sacred" the accomplishment of a good
distribution of goods system. (Sacri-fice = Sacre-d) Only the incest
taboo is more personally evil in the West so it has to be very well hidden
if you are going to practice the use of "Sacrificial Victims." Perhaps it
would be helpful to remember that certain economists have advocated the use
of war as a tool for the growth of an economy. In fact GWB may be
operating on such an assumption along with his academics. While the
practical soldiers are resistant to be made "sacred" in such a manner.
In spite of the passion, you seem to be making the argument that the only
valid or valuable work is the most simple and the easiest to do, i.e. short
term work. Or as the magazine Business Week made the point several years
before the fall of the Berlin Wall: "The problem with the Soviet Union and
Communism is 'toilet paper', you can't get a good roll anywhere."
Actually they were making the central point in their criticism. The poor
distribution techniques for widgets. That distribution is what capitalism
does really well. You can get your toilet paper when you need it.
Frankly, they lied about the lack of creativity in the Soviet system (lying
during war is allowed if you are trying to win. Judeo-Christianity is
suspended. It doesn't seem to matter what you do as long as your
"ideals" are great or "no matter how my life turns out, judge me by my New
Year's resolutions.") If they had told the truth we might have competed
and developed the best of both systems but that would have precluded the
pillaging frenzy available to our TNCs in the present. Why didn't we
have a Marshall plan for Russia like we did for Europe and Japan? Because
both Europe and Japan were in shambles. Russia was intact. ("Oh Boy,
what a bunch of bargains! Just like when we got those Mansions and Peach
Orchards for a song in the old Cherokee Nation. Georgia even named their
state the "Peach Tree" state in rememberance of that glorious act. And
their selling to tourists today on their websites are amazing too. They
acknowledge the genocide and pillage and sell tickets to see where it
happened. That's Capitalism! Up with envy and creative selfishness! Up
with predators! That sure beats a patent when it comes to long term
payback on an investment!" )
Such thinking is a problem in public health, education, law, culture etc.
but let us just take your coming Prostate cancer issue where the standard
medical model finds preventive health too difficult (Biochemical
individuality and all that rotten trick by God on the institutions of
capitalist mankind). Like the police trying to stop a rape before it
happens they only treat someone after medical science has ignored it and
"allowed" the individual to have screwed up their body and gotten sick.
Medicine then becomes the "widget" that is sold. Unfortunately it also
gives the unscrupulous a reason for making you sick. Today's market
emphasis on "private entrepreneurs" rather than Healers i.e. "Entrepreneurs
get paid and Healers starve" seems to represent a "conflict of interest" as
in CEOs and Enron, World/com etc. but we can avoid a "conflict of interest"
simply by putting the entrepreneurs in charge. How many deaths are caused
by the use and abuse of such "widgets" in the Western world these days?
None unless you count them. Dang government interference. That is what
made the 'publicans want to disband the department of education and the NEA
with all of their dang numbers. See, thinking holistically is a b......!
Not only that but when a Doctor comes up with a system, patents it and
actually lowers weight and cholesterol with his 'system' the entire
industry spends its time trying to disprove him. Why? I lost thirty
five pounds and lowered my cholesterol from 212 to 137 on the Atkins diet
and am happy being able to eat what I want. But you should hear the
clamor from the people whose systems didn't work for me. Personally I
would prefer to give all the Doctors a couple of hundred thousand dollars on
salary and make them come up with ways to keep me healthy and happy rather
than going through the drug stuff. If they didn't do their job, and I
got sick, then fine them or fire them or let them work in sanitation for a
while.
So Mike, what I'm saying is that "systems thought" is the opposite of
"widget thought." The "trick" of both Capitalist (widget thought) and
Communist (Centralized systems thought) is to claim that there are only two.
I have said at least four times recently that there are in my feeble lead
eaten artist brain at least four: ( 1. Capitalist 2. Communist 3.
Non-Communist Socialist and 4. Aristocratic elitist) that through "liberal"
morality and culture have worked in the Western world for various groups of
professions, cultures, families etc. but none for the whole society. I
may be damaged or work for an unapproved sector of the Capitalist economy
but if I'm reading the charts and these guys are still preaching orthodoxy
that doesn't work. Who has the brain damage here? Maybe they should
all come down and have a taste of lead dust for a few years and have their
best friends live in piano crates and RVs for a while just to learn that
they too are not there because they are inferior or have done something
wrong. Holistic, as in whole and holy, thinking means like John Dunne
said:
"no man is an island, no man stands alone, each man's joy is joy to me, each
man's grief is my own.
we need on another so I will defend each man as my brother, each man as my
friend."
Thinking holistically means that you make it possible for all of the modern
professions and functions of society to have a decent wage and that you
reward exceptional thought that benefits the whole society. Thinking
holistically means that you give everyone the same education and pay the
people who teach the next seven generation comparable salaries to the
distributors of toilet paper. And that you do the same for the people who
will teach you to live a long and healthy life through preventitive
medicine. That you will make sure that every person in your society has a
place to live and food to eat so that they can develop the inner motivations
to explore as the human spirit is naturally equipped to do. That you will
not spend the first ten years of a child's life breaking its spirit and
teaching it to avoid learning and inner motivation, beating it senseless
until the genius of the child becomes the dim witted mind of the adult who
finds physics a bore and art a frill. Thinking holistically means that
you understand why you build a house the way you do instead of just wanting
a bigger one for some unfulfilled desire that will never in your life be
satisfied except through the process of greater unconscious consumption.
> Typically. people who buy this commodity aren't interested in buying
> whole persons, only in buying a market commidity. Whole persons
> aren't a predictable commodity.
You mix the local yokel with the meaning of work and come up with? Holism
is about meaning and critical thought. I don't mean to imply that
distribution is not important. Not having toilet paper available is very
inconvienant and not having the micro-chip available for your fighter jet is
more than inconveniant. What I am saying is that the meaning of life is
not to be found in distribution but in understanding who you are, what your
place is in the world and how it has value. Most of the people earning
millions and in some cases billions, the world would not miss if they
disappeared tomorrow. But Brahms, they would miss. It would take a long
time for people to forget Brahms. Who was that man who invented the wing
nut? It will take me my whole life to forget J.S. Mill and the other
Utilitarians who started us down this insane path to an immoral present.
Significant they were and significantly evil in their results as well.
Yes and many of them were "non-conformist" translate fundamentalist
religionists of one particular faith.
>
> And whole persons get all f***ed up trying to carry on human endeavor
> *as* whole persons and simultaneously trying to commoditize themselves
> for a "job" or trying to merchandise their endeavors.
>
> - Mike
I'm glad I went to your web site. I don't think I could understand what
you were saying until I saw your work. What I get from this is that you
are mixing up levels of work. There is a place for distribution in the
whole of things. And you can't deal with the "whole", except
conceptually, unless you have the power to do so and from a place of
respect to the rest. My old Elder used to compare it to having a soap box
to speak from. What I am referring to here, and seem to be becoming the
campus Crank in all of this, is that decrying public education, public
health, spirituality, public safety and quality of life is a useless and
even fraudulent endeavor if one never seriously considers the uniqueness of
their purpose as well as their value to the critical life of the community.
The immediate things like police and health are always taken care of due to
that immediacy but rarely are well thought through. Considering such
things from the monetary cost is usually to do them badly. That is why I
don't believe that Harry's "minimum cost" model has much relevance to the
internally motivated professions. Its not that we aren't frugal. I
don't know anyone who can stretch a dollar like an artist but that comes
from a superior knowledge of the materials, a skill comprehension that must
be perfect simply to begin with, and the necessary networking to get
everything done inspite of the cost problem. Artists often have problems
with greater funding simply because fundraising and plentiful resources has
its own universe. One could compare it to the resources and skills
necessary to be an Inuit or a Bedouin in a place of few resources compared
to what it means to negotiate the cultural waters at Palm Beach. Or we
might compare it to the children of Russian parents who were terrific
students in the old Soviet System that didn't allow choice and who give up
their skills and expertise when they come to America because of the
overwhelming novelty of this consumer place of plenty. My point is that it
is not an issue of cost at all but of the environmental context in which the
artist works as to whether they handle large resources well or not. But in
America, artists are forced to be more like Inuit's and less like the
exceptional productions in places like the Edinbourough Festival, Salzburg
or Berlin.
In America, public professions are often operated on the backs of the
practitioners through the instrument of "Public Goods" theory and the
approval by the authorities of "Strategic Giving." Strategic Giving, as
you know, means that the most able to give get by giving the least while
the rest, who give the most, blame the practitioners and reduce both
monetary compensation and public esteem for those practitioners. For
example, as I am sure that you have encountered, that the hierarchy of
knowledge in today's educational institutions glorifies factual data as real
and then places such sciences as health as necessary but soft headed (due to
the placebo effect ) and psychology, anthropology, sociology as demi-real,
spirituality as un-real and finally athletics and the fine arts as real but
frivolous in spite of the necessity for CEOs to be physically fit and the
fact that almost 100% of the creative scientists and business folks surround
themselves with Artists as a business necessity. (See Richard Florida's
research in his book and web site "The Rise of the Creative Class" Basic
Books) I would also make the point that Florida's research which bears
certainly upon the Future of Work was roundly ignored when I presented it
earlier while we spend out time debating the old nature versus nurture
theories of "factual" science. We are obviously more comfortable with
something that we can come up with a hard mathematical formula for even when
it is as dubious as arguing that "muscle memory learning" is transferred
from one generation to the next. Obviously these folks have never done
any serious teaching to believe such hogwash. On the other hand, culture
does carry knowledge in millions of ways externally from one generation to
the next. To declare that inclinations based upon physiology are the same
as hard science and will create superior human beings by selective breeding
flies in the face of reality. There are too many geniuses and experts that
have come from non-connected groups, like the Japanese singing Italian opera
at La Scala, for the Italians to prove any genetic connection to the
over-tone series in bel canto. On the other hand the Italian language
which is external to the Italian child, does give certain advantages to the
singing of a legato line, over English, just as the Japanese bright vowel
helps them with squillo in a way that offends most American English
speakers, but not the Brits. Talent is also dubious since only at the
level of "world class" skills does such thing make much difference. I
have spent my entire educational career developing professional level
performances from people who were not professionals and in many cases did
not consider that they could sing at all. Most of the issues of talent and
genetics up to the very highest levels are the results of either good or bad
pedagogy and that is all.
The history of the mistake made both by the professional performing artists
and the elite of North America is noted in the Massey Lecture series at
Harvard by the outstanding American Historian Lawrence W. Levine. Another
book that I have recommended and been ignored on this list. The book is
Highbrow/Lowbrow, The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, Harvard.
Levine is not an Art's historian but a generalist who simply looked where no
one else was looking and came up with gold. The questions is simple.
Why was no one else looking? Because it wasn't valuable and the subject
was real but frivolous. And therein lies the problem. What kind of
culture, society do you want to live and work in. Do you prefer the dumb
elite or the dumb poor or the intelligent but naive elite and the hostile
intelligent poor? What would bring back equality as a worthy goal for
Democracy and would restore to the industries of America a meritocracy when
dealing with advancement. There is nothing that says a rich man should
be allowed to give his dumb children advantages over the intelligent
children of the poor man when it comes to value in the society. And that
is all I have to say.
Good to think with you,
Ray Evans Harrell
