----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, December 10, 2003 4:11
PM
Subject: RE: [Futurework] The poverty of
nation-states
Ray,
An adult student of mine was CEO of one of the large
enterprises in the LA area - and they were locked in a
strike.
He mentioned in class that "at least, these days the
people we are talking to are just like ourselves". I had an
eerie vision of suits gathered around the table discussing the conditions
of people in overalls and muddy boots and you couldn't tell on which side each
of the suits was. (Maybe not mud - horses were involved.)
The strength of the two assumptions is that they
apply to every individual, whether she be a homeless woman, or the Queen of
England. Their manifest activities may be very different, but the person is
the same.
So, the poor man buys a television set (what, no
television set!) and the rich man buys a yacht (what, no yacht!). They are
just acting like people. You can expect the poor man, if he wins the lottery
to get himself a yacht - or something equivalent that fits his new
station.
Harry
********************************************
Henry George School of Social
Science
of Los
Angeles
Box 655
Tujunga CA 91042
Tel: 818 352-4141 -- Fax: 818 353-2242
http://haledward.home.comcast.net
********************************************
Vital you are Keith but you are making assumptions about
me that are based upon how other people, not I, use this
language. I will take the time to go line by line to make the
point. I reread my post to you and if others draw your
conclusions about my position they are incorrect. In
short, you may have read that but you weren't reading what I wrote or what the
intent was behind what I wrote. I'm not sure what the issue is
there but it came up in your posts Brad as well. Each
person has many universes within themselves that negotiate to arrive at a
post. Each person has a symmetrical synergy that arrives,
through their language and cultural stories, at a way of writing in English
that then must be seriously considered slowly and gently for the travel
information.
We do not have such things as micro-sync-movements of
the face or tonal inflections to give us information from the other
perceptual modes that would help in interpreting writing. That is
why some help from the person writing is always beneficial. I
would say that since my modes of thought are radically different from yours
that it can both help you think outside your envelope if you read it
aloud. Cherokee speech is basically story telling at its roots and
the forms are aural, musical if you will. We consider all
information to be not THE way of something but A way.
That means that, unless you are describing what I wrote,
I have to project off of what you are saying. If you then are not
understood on your issues, it is your reponsibility to correct and help
me and the reverse. That way we create a dialogue that helps us
see and accept each other. In that way we also examine
"objective" issues.
But the issues serve a personal purpose, unless we are
working in a company and hired by the minute, in which case the issues and the
efficiency of our energy, belong to the company.
For me, on this list, we are dialogueing and trying to think outside the
envelope and chatting as a way of fulfilling internal needs to communicate as
friends.
We also may use each other for such things as feedback
on personal projects and dissemination of information into the greater
world. e.g. I sent you all my press releases.
I find it interesting that the more strong cultural
statements that I post on this list, from my own culture, often stop the list
cold. Its as if the list didn't know that it existed.
But when I post something I am giving permission for it to be discussed, for
example, the messages about storytelling and how the external is created in
the imagination, inherent in the Silko poem that I studiously typed into the
discussion on teaching. I suspect that everyone thought it was
simply a racist tract against whites. It is a rather famous poem
that is used in Universities all across America to discuss culture and has
several faculty university papers written about it on the
internet. The discussions on economist Richard Florida who
has studied entrepreneurial creativity in arts rich environments,
are another. I've had people come back to me and ask if I
had read him when I did a whole discussion, with myself ,on this list sometime
ago on Richard Florida and his economic ideas. There wasn't a
peep. Unless people simply deleted the post without reading it I
will assume that the information was too "outside the envelope" to make
contact.
But in the case below, we have made contact and I will
not correct your ideas but simply your assumptions about what I meant.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, December 05, 2003 1:58
AM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] The poverty
of nation-states
Sorry Ray,
The basic mistake you are making is that
you assume that there is something evil which you call Capitalism, and that
there is a class of people, whom you call Capitalists, who are somehow
different from the rest of us.
No I do not assume it to be evil and I do
not assume capitalists to be so. But I do observe that
capitalists who had a contract with the US that was made in 1883, to assume
the payment for charitable activities rather than have the government do it,
have broken that contract today and that most don't even know it
exists. The underlying words are all of those statements
about "socialism" and its evils that were a part of the original contract
that hired capitalists to do the work on social welfare. In
America they are a miserable failure and have taken welfare to their class
alone.
This is not so. Rich aristocrats, entrepreneurs,
investment bankers, politicians, civil servants, consumers, young people and
old, middle-class, working-class and the poor are all almost exactly the
same in the basic instincts which drive them.
Just because everyone eats doesn't mean that
everyone is moral. Just because everyone feels empathy at birth
does not mean that certain class structures don't breed social empathy out
through education and conditioning typical of their class.
If that is not so then just return the children of the wealthy to the same
playing field and let's see how they do. Wealthy parents could
transfir their wealth to their children as capital in business and escape
the inheritance tax but they are afraid knowing full well, that their
children have little empathy towards them as a result of their own selfish
teachings.
Place any single member of any one of these categories
into another category and he/she will begin to behave in exactly the same
way as those already there.
That makes no sense to me. I
believe that you are simply being rhetorical. If you aren't then
that doesn't explain our personal differences. Years ago
Christian theologians made the same assumptions until they sat down and
actually began to converse face to face. They found that they
weren't alike and that their personal views, although changed, did not
become alike through common experience. I suspect that you
are either caught in your argument or simply telling the same old economic
story that has gotten our business into the mess its in. So you
and I should agree, but we don't. It ain't that simple.
In my introduction to Heller's and McRae's pieces, I was
not being emotional. Far from it. What I'm suggesting is that we need to
know a great deal more about the basic emotions which drive us before we can
possibly get out of the trap into which developed countries have driven
themselves.
I think the science is already
there. What is missing is the same old Western problem of
cultural respect.
Nation-states can do very little more in order to
ameliorate the condition into which consumerism (that is, the outcome of one
of the most powerful of our basic drives) has driven us.
Do you really believe the need to buy a status
good is as strong as love? You are creating a whole
theology around business. I don't think it is scientific and I
don't accept the premise. It is not consonant with my
experience.
I would like to see what you call Capitalism being brought
to a close as much as you do, but nation-states obviously can't do it. The
more we try in the present context the more we are digging ourselves into a
hole in the ground.
I thought I made it clear that we had
chosen "capitalism". I accept that. What I don't
accept is the necessity to act like Wolverines just because we are
capitalists. I think being human is different and has its own
potentials.
The Chinese, who are nowhere near the level of welfarism of the
western developed countries, will run into exactly the same buffers as ours
in, say, 20 years' time when consumerism has run its course and they, like
our middle-class, have no time in which to 'enjoy' any more consumer goodies
which are significant enough to drive the economic growth system.
I don't understand this at all. The
Chinese have social welfare in their souls. That is why they all
work, almost reflex, with the group. That is the root of
"face." It connects to family and to performance and
permeates their entire being. They don't have much empathy
for foreigners as a group, but for each other? Well, if they let
a person die on the road it is not for selfish reasons but for the story
that goes that their own individual destiny must not be tampered
with. Responsibility is also big in China. But their
welfare programs, for all children, far outruns, as did the Soviets, the
programs of education in the West which are tied to wealth. The
Chinese have re-introduced wealth into their country but they are still
Communists and the largest party in Russia is Communist as well.
Communism is about social welfare from cradle to grave. I don't
see that in America, England or otherwise. Maybe Sweden and Tor
could tell us about Norway. I would add that admitting this in
no way means that I am advocating Communism as a system. This is
my home and I've been a capitalist almost from birth. It is my
system but morality and personal empathy is a part of my cultural
training. The Sociopathic mentality of so many of our citizens,
who are successful, is immoral and they should have been taught
better. That mentality is more prevelent in
the 20% that has 50% of the wealth by virtue of modern technology and
automation, than it is of the other 80%. The country belongs to
us all. There is not reason why someone deserves so much more of their
share of it simply by the accident of birth and a chauvinistic education.
Perhaps they might be clever enough to 'mutate' their governmental
systems in some way so that they avoid the same condition we are in. Perhaps
we might find a solution, too, in the interim. I don't know. But we first
have to understand a lot more clearly and objectively why we have reached
our present condition before we can hope to change it -- or recognise
appropriate changes if they start to happen of their own volition.
I think even a no brainer like Charles Brain diagnosed
that in his robot letter. I would suggest you go back and
re-read it. His figures are accurate and his schematics are
clear.
Thanks, anyway, for calling me 'vital' ! I
enjoyed that.
You are certianly one of the more vital people I have
met on the internet. How about "vital and
intelligent". I can say that as well.
REHthe Micro-soft Windows, version of running a society and we all use
it because we all use it. But there is not superiority to
corporations in fact they are feudal in their structures and
regressive. To call them the future is frightening and a retreat
to the old feudal aristocracies based now on money rather than
weapons. But weapons will make a comeback once they take over
the police and armies. I can't imagine you are even
contemplating such a barbaric society.
Second of all, the
articles that Sally has been putting on the list for years never seems to
have gotten through. But at least Edward Deming and Japan
should. Japan has NO natural resources and no way of
making money other than their culture and the culture of their
government. Their little cottage natural industries are like
national treasures that they protect just to prove that they are "human"
like the other farmers of the world. But Japan is
different. China has natural resources Japan has almost none,
but Japan is the second largest economy on the planet. How
come? Even with all of the terrible stagnation I have relatives
who are more comfortable living in the quality of life in Japan, a country
they don't even speak the language, than they do in this Western
paradise. Japan understands that all capital is
ultimately human and used Deming to automate the drudgery. The
world has beaten them up with their stories about trade but Japan is still
Japanese and that is the most frustrating thing for all of the world
economists who try to knock down the door and destroy the culture in the
name of world markets. Don't get me wrong I don't idealize the
Japanese, they are often chauvinists of the first order and would have done
away with the rain forests in a moment just because they could and were
efficient enough to use every single piece of trees leaving nothing to
renew. But they set a very high standard for the rest of
the world in art and now in music and in technology. Their
knowledge of world cultures makes the average anglophile seem well
Anglophilic. One of my friends calls the Japanese the
British of Asia.
So what does Sally and the Japanese have to do with
this? Simple, the corporations and money you claim for these
wealthy dunderheads is coming about because of an accident of most of their
births. Automation or Robotomation that puts consumers out of
work and increases the wealth of the few beyond owning 80% of the wealth of
America is the beginning of America as a banana republic.
Unless there is a change in paradigm from the one you are suggesting, the
human race is cooked.
Another point is in the ghettoization of the Elders of a
society into a permanent state of relaxation into the grave.
Instead of freeing people from profit to work on the health and wealth of a
nation we turn the Elders into a permanent consumer that eats himself to
death on the beach. Instead of someone vital like Keith Hudson,
we get whimpering complainers who love their white pants and polyester
shirts and go to the opera a couple of times a year as long as its
Verdi. I'm not suggesting working them to death, but
suggesting that a creative solution to finding how to make their last years
pleasurable and productive through social opportunities is far superior to
paying them for relaxing, eating and dying. Community
service would not be such a bad thing. We could give credit for
taking care of the Grandkids and other family things as
well. The original purpose of retirement was to get them
out of the work force. Today's workforce is not only smaller
because there are fewer people but because there are much fewer jobs (as
Sally subtly points out with her articles) of the drudgery type and we
haven't figured out how to pay people for quality of life non-profit jobs
that create great societies. Simply giving money away is to
create a lazy wealthy society just like all of the slave
societies. I would even prefer the silliness of Brave New World
to such depressive entitlement. We should work to create
an expectation for human development and encourage the best in people while
knowing that some won't succeed with some but stressing the fulfillment and
value of continuing human development and sharing as people finish their
lives on this plain.
But we it will take a
paradigm shift away from the last three hundred years of abuse, robbery and
hyper technological development. We will have to discover a more
symetrical society that stresses balance of all of the elements that make
sanity attractive. Instead we get the Stephen Hawking
version of mobility.
Ray Evans
Harrell
---
Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free.
Checked by
AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
Version: 6.0.548 / Virus
Database: 341 - Release Date:
12/5/2003