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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
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