"Robert F. Tatman" wrote:
>
> C'mon, Kris, gimme a break! "American Beauty" is pure trash
> --nothing more than Hollywood calculating the lowest common
> denominator
Consider the following ideas by Robert Anton Wilson and
R. Buckminster Fuller (in reference to The RICH Economy).
IMO, they make this "lowest common denominator" factor
that Kevin Spacey went through in American Beauty, that
seems to piss you off so much, make perfect sense.
First, as RAW puts it: there is only so much fucking,
smoking dope, and watching TV one can handle before they
get bored and want to *do* something. And (to quote RAW
again): "As Bucky Fuller says, the first thought of people,
once they are delivered from wage slavery, will be, "What
was it that I was so interested in as a youth, before I
was told I had to earn a living?" The answer to that
question, coming from millions and then billions of
persons liberated from mechanical toil, will make the
Renaissance look like a high school science fair or a
Greenwich Village art show".
In other words, after Kevin Spacey was "liberated from
wage slavery" (with a guaranteed income of 60k, just as
will *everyone* in The RICH Economy), he fell into
all this vice that the "holier then thou", "my shit don't
stink", morality police are always freaking out about.
To quote Steve Mizrach:
"Ultimately, there will be opponents of the
abolition of work. They are the Puritans and Calvinists
who have waged war on freedom in the name of the
"Protestant Work Ethic," because leisure allows the
imagination to roam, the mind to question authority,
and the self to contemplate true pleasure. These are
things that the Puritans hate, fear, and try to destroy
- such as they sought to ban dramatic theatre, carnivals,
festivals, and holidays in Britain under their dour and
repressive regime. They only want us to have one day out
of seven where we can rest, and that day is to be filled
with the requirements of "prayer" and obedience to their
taskmaster deity. Why not seven out of seven? There is
nothing dignified about work for its own sake, nothing
in it that contributes to the body or to the spirit.
Creation is what human existence is all about - the
making of new things. Not the constant remaking of
the old: the mediocrity and the bottom line and the
common denominator of mass production." [1]
So basically he began smoking dope again; he wanted
to bone the cheerleader again (and began working out
in hopes that he one day would); and curiously, he
also took a lowly wage slave position in a burger
joint that most 'respectable' people his age wouldn't
consider accepting, even if they were about homeless
and starving. Why did he take this seemingly degrading
wage slave position almost as soon as he was liberated
from wage slavery? He didn't *need* the 'money'. I'm
sure he didn't need the stares and glares of customers
who must have wondered why someone of his age and
seeming intelligence was working there, and so on,
and so forth. (True he was stoned when he applied,
but if that was the only reason, he would have quit
when the high wore off. Something else kept him there).
IMO, he became a burger-flipping wage slave because
he was attempting to get back into that mind-set he
had before he was 'forced' to "grow up", "get a real
job" and "keep up with the Jones'" (i.e., "notice that
the colors of my wife's clogs, and the handle of cutters
match -- this was no accident"). Remember when he
was getting stoned for the first time in decades, and he
told his cannabis-loving neighbor: when I was your age,
all I did that summer was flip burgers, get stoned,
and get laid. That's why he took that lowly wage
slave job again.
Yet as RAW bluntly puts it: there is only so much
fucking, smoking dope, and watching TV one can handle
before they get bored and want to *do* something. I
wonder what Spacey would have done (if he wasn't
murdered), after he finally did get bored? [When
he *didn't* bone the cheerleader because she was
a virgin (what was that about "lowest common
denominator" again?), it seems he was starting
to get "bored"].
In case you don't know what The RICH Economy
is, here's a brief introduction to the theory
"our beleaguered Kris" posted to the list a while
back (and there is more info on the web) [2]:
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [CTRL] ::: The RICH Economy :::
Date: Wed, 9 Sep 1998 11:30:23 EDT
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
-Caveat Lector-
from alt.conspiracy
-----
As always, Caveat Lector.
Om
K
-----
<A HREF="aol://5863:126/alt.conspiracy:415496">::: The RICH Economy :::</A>
-----
Subject: ::: The RICH Economy :::
From: Dan Clore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Thu, Sep 3, 1998 5:19 AM
Message-id: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The RICH Economy
by Robert Anton Wilson
from The Illuminati Papers
If there is one proposition which currently wins the assent of nearly
everybody, it is that we need more jobs. "A cure for unemployment"
is promised, or earnestly sought, by every Heavy Thinker from
Jimmy Carter to the Communist Party USA, from Ronald Reagan to
the head of the economics department at the local university, from
the Birchers to the New Left.
I would like to challenge that idea. I don't think there is, or ever
again can be, a cure for unemployment. I propose that unemployment is
not a disease, but the natural, healthy functioning of an advanced
technological society.
The inevitable direction of any technology, and of any rational
species such as Homo sap., is toward what Buckminster Fuller calls
ephemeralization, or doing-more-with-less. For instance, a modern
computer does more (handles more bits of information) with less
hardware than the proto-computers of the late '40s and '50s. One
worker with a modern teletype machine does more in an hour than a
thousand medieval monks painstakingly copying scrolls for a century.
Atomic fission does more with a cubic centimeter of matter than all
the engineers of the 19th Century could do with a million tons, and
fusion does even more.
Unemployment is not a disease; so it has no "cure."
This tendency toward ephemeralization or doing more-with-less is
based on two principal factors, viz:
1.The increment-of-association, a term coined by engineer C.H.
Douglas, a meaning simply that when we combine our efforts
we can do more than the sum of what each of us could do
seperately. Five people acting synergetically together can lift a
small modern car, but if each of the five tries separately, the car
will not budge. As society evolved from tiny bands, to larger
tribes, to federations of tribes, to city-states, to nations, to
multinational alliances, the increment-of-association increased
exponentially. A stone-age hunting band could not build the
Parthenon; a Renaissance city-state could not put Neil
Armstrong on the Moon. When the increment-of-association
increases, through larger social units, doing-more-with-less
becomes increasingly possible.
2.Knowledge itself is inherently self-augmenting. Every discovery
"suggests" further discoveries; every innovation provokes
further innovations. This can be seen concretely, in the records
of the U.S. Patent Office, where you will find more patents
granted every year than were granted the year before, in a
rising curve that seems to be headed toward infinity. If Inventor
A can make a Whatsit out of 20 moving parts, Inventor B will
come along and build a Whatsit out of 10 moving parts. If the
technology of 1900 can get 100 ergs out of a
Whatchamacallum, the technology of 1950 can get 1,000 ergs.
Again, the tendency is always toward doing-more-with-less.
Unemployment is directly caused by this technological capacity
to do more-with-less. Thousands of monks were technologically
unemployed by Gutenberg. Thousands of blacksmiths were
technologically unemployed by Ford's Model T. Each device that
does-more-with-less makes human labor that much less necessary.
Aristotle said that slavery could only be abolished when machines
were built that could operate themselves. Working for wages, the
modern equivalent of slavery -- very accurately called "wage slavery"
by social critics -- is in the process of being abolished by just such
self-programming machines. In fact, Norbert Wiener, one of the
creators of cybernetics, foresaw this as early as 1947 and warned
that we would have massive unemployment once the computer
revolution really got moving.
It is arguable, and I for one would argue, that the only reason
Wiener's prediction has not totally been realized yet -- although we
do have ever-increasing unemployment -- is that big unions, the
corporations, and government have all tacitly agreed to slow down
the pace of cybernation, to drag their feet and run the economy with
the brakes on. This is because they all, still, regard unemployment
as a "disease" and cannot imagine a "cure" for the nearly total
unemployment that full cybernation will create.
Suppose, for a moment, we challenge this Calvinistic mind-set. Let
us regard wage-work -- as most people do, in fact, regard it -- as a
curse, a drag, a nuisance, a barrier that stands between us and what
we really want to do. In that case, your job is the disease, and
unemployment is the cure.
"But without working for wages we'll all starve to death!?! Won't
we?"
Not at all. Many farseeing social thinkers have suggested intelligent
and plausible plans for adapting to a society of rising unemployment.
Here are some examples.
1.The National Dividend. This was invented by engineer C. H.
Douglas and has been revived with some modifications by poet
Ezra Pound and designer Buckminster Fuller. The basic idea
(although Douglas, Pound, and Fuller differ on the details) is
that every citizen should be declared a shareholder in the
nation, and should receive dividends on the Gross National
Product for the year. Estimates differ as to how much this
would be for each citizen, but at the current level of the GNP it
is conservative to say that a share would be worth several times
as much, per year, as a welfare recipient receives -- at least five
times more. Critics complain that this would be inflationary.
Supporters of the National Dividend reply that it would only be
inflationary if the dividends distributed were more than the
GNP; and they are proposing only to issue dividends equal to
the GNP.
2.The Guaranteed Annual Income. This has been urged by
economist Robert Theobald and others. The government would
simply establish an income level above the poverty line and
guarantee that no citizen would receive less; if your wages fall
below that level, or you have no wages, the government makes
up the difference. This plan would definitely cost the
government less than the present welfare system, with all its
bureaucratic red tape and redundancy: a point worth
considering for those conservatives who are always complaining
about the high cost of welfare. It would also spare the recipients
the humiliation, degradation and dehumanization built into the
present welfare system: a point for liberals to consider. A
system that is less expensive than welfare and also less debasing
to the poor, it seems to me, should not be objectionable to
anybody but hardcore sadists.
3.The Negative Income Tax. This was first devised by Nobel
economist Milton Friedman and is a less radical variation on
the above ideas. The Negative Income Tax would establish a
minimum income for every citizen; anyone whose income fell
below that level would receive the amount necessary to bring
them up to that standard. Friedman, who is sometimes called a
conservative but prefers to title himself a libertarian, points out
that this would cost "the government" (i.e. the taxpayers) less
than the present welfare system, like Theobald's Guaranteed
Annual Income. It would also dispense with the last tinge of
humiliation associated with government "charity," since when
you cashed a check from IRS nobody (not even your banker)
would know if it was supplementary income due to poverty or
a refund due to overpayment of last year's taxes.
4.The RICH Economy. This was devised by inventor L. Wayne
Benner (co-author with Timothy Leary of Terra II) in
collaboration with the present author. It's a four-stage program
to retool society for the cybernetic and space-age future we are
rapidly entering. RICH means Rising Income through
Cybernetic Homeostasis.
Stage I
is to recognize that cybernation and massive
unemployment are inevitable and to encourage them. This
can be done by offering a $100,000 reward to any worker
who can design a machine that will replace him or her,
and all others doing the same work. In other words,
instead of being dragged into the cybernetic age kicking
and screaming, we should charge ahead bravely, regarding
the Toilless Society as the Utopian goal humanity has
always sought.
Stage II
is to establish either the Negative Income Tax or the
Guaranteed Annual Income, so that the massive
unemployment caused by Stage I will not throw hordes of
people into the degradation of the present welfare system.
Stage III
is to gradually, experimentally, raise the Guaranteed
Annual Income to the level of the National Dividend
suggested by Douglas, Bucky Fuller, and Ezra Pound,
which would give every citizen the approximate living
standard of the comfortable middle class. The reason for
doing this gradually is to pacify those conservative
economists who claim that the National Dividend is
"inflationary" or would be practically wrecking the
banking business by lowering the interest rate to
near-zero. It is our claim that this would not happen as
long as the total dividends distributed to the populace
equaled the Gross National Product. but since this is a
revolutionary and controversial idea, it would be prudent,
we allow, to approach it in slow steps, raising the
minimum income perhaps 5 per cent per year for the first
ten years. And, after the massive cybernation caused by
Stage I has produced a glut of consumer goods,
experimentally raise it further and faster toward the level
of a true National Dividend.
Stage IV
is a massive investment in adult education, for two
reasons.
1.People can spend only so much time fucking,
smoking dope, and watching TV; after a while they
get bored. This is the main psychological objection
to the workless society, and the answer to it is to
educate people for functions more cerebral than
fucking, smoking dope, watching TV, or the idiot
jobs most are currently toiling at.
2.There are vast challenges and opportunities
confronting us in the next three or four decades, of
which the most notable are those highlighted in Tim
Leary's SMI2LE slogan -- Space Migration,
Intelligence Increase, Life Extension. Humanity is
about to enter an entirely new evolutionary
relationship to space, time, and consciousness. We
will no longer be limited to one planet, to a brief,
less-than-a-century lifespan, and to the stereotyped
and robotic mental processes by which most people
currently govern their lives. Everybody deserves the
chance, if they want it, to participate in the
evolutionary leap to what Leary calls "more space,
more time, and more intelligence to enjoy space and
time."
What I am proposing, in brief, is that the Work Ethic (find a Master
to employ you for wages, or live in squalid poverty) is obsolete. A
Work Esthetic will have to arise to replace this old Stone Age
syndrome of the slave, the peasant, the serf, the prole, the
wage-worker -- the human labor-machine who is not fully a person
but, as Marx said, " a tool, an automaton." Delivered from the role of
things and robots, people will learn to become fully developed
persons, in the sense of the Human Potential movement. They will
not seek work out of economic necessity, but out of psychological
necessity -- as an outlet for their creative potential.
("Creative potential" is not a panchreston. It refers to the inborn
drive to play, to tinker, to explore, and to experiment, shown by every
child before his or her mental processes are stunted by authoritarian
education and operant-conditioned wage-robotry.)
As Bucky Fuller says, the first thought of people, once they are
delivered from wage slavery, will be, "What was it that I was so
interested in as a youth, before I was told I had to earn a living?" The
answer to that question, coming from millions and then billions of
persons liberated from mechanical toil, will make the Renaissance
look like a high school science fair or a Greenwich Village art show.
---------------------------------------------------
Dan Clore
The Website of Lord We˙rdgliffe:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/index.html
Welcome to the Waughters....
The Dan Clore Necronomicon Page:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/necpage.htm
Because the true mysteries cannot be profaned....
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!"
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
---
[1]http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/slackblack.html
[2]http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/leisure/bucky.html
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