Technology:
When we consider the relevance of our social structures and ideologies in society, very often we view governments, politicians and corporations as the guiding organizational and catalystic institutions responsible for the quality of our lives. This is, of course, true... but only to a certain extent. As time has moved forward, human beings have become more and more aware of nature, its processes, and thus have been able to derive inference about how to imitate nature in all its creative glory.
The result has been Technology, which is what separates us humans from the other species as far as functionality. We have the ability to create in very vast ways. If we don't want to clean sewers, we can devise a machine to do it for us.
At the beginning of the Industrial Age, a great majority of people worked in factories. Today, automation comprises 90% of nearly all factories. This has displaced humans and created a large, artificial "service" industry in order to keep humans in employment for money.
This pattern is very revealing. The implication is that machine automation is constantly challenging the role of general human labor. This doesn't mean that humans will have "nothing to do" as time moves on. Quite the contrary... this implication denotes the freeing of humanity from jobs which humans do not care to engage in, so they will have time to pursue what they choose to. As an aside, it is important to point out that society today assumes a very negative posture towards humanity, retaining the belief that if human beings were not "required" to do something, they would just sit around, be lazy, and do nothing. This is absurd propaganda.
The notion of "leisure" is a monetary invention, created because of the oppressive, fascist basis of the employment institution itself. Laziness is, in fact, a form of rejection of the system. It is a quality that only exists due to the oppression and required servitude.
In a true society, there would be no such thing as the separation of "work and "leisure", for humans should be allowed to pursue whatever they feel is relevant. To put it a different way, consider the curiosity and interest of a child. He or she doesn't even know what money is...Do they need to be motivated by money to go out and explore/create? No. They have a personal interest and they pursue it without reward. In fact, the greatest contributors to our society, such as Einstein, Newton or Galileo, pursued what they did without any regard to money. They did it because they wanted to. The act of doing and contributing was their reward.
The point here is that money is not a true incentive for anything and to think as such is to assume that humans are inherently lazy and corrupt. Laziness and corruption are products of the conditioning our social system creates.
Now, coming back to technology, we find that our quality of life, as far as functionality, has been increased greatly by the benefits of the technological tools we create. From a lawn mower to a pace maker, technology saves lives and decreases the amount of time we need to spend on mundane, difficult or dangerous activities. In fact, if one steps back far enough, it becomes clear that Technological development is the most important institution we have and the pursuit of socially helpful technology(not weapons) should be the highest priority of the culture.
At the same time, technological development is brought about by a particular train of thought, or process... this could be called "The Scientific Method". Carl Sagan was once quoted as saying something to the effect of "Society welcomes the gifts of science, but rejects its methods".
This is very true in the modern age, for what the public fails to understand is that science is not just a tool... it is a near universal functionality which can be applied to society in ways many would not think about.
It seems obvious that technology improves our lives and serves as the greatest liberator of human life in the material realm... so why aren't its methods applied to society as a whole?
Obviously, the scientific method is used constantly for isolated systems, but it has never been truly considered in the broadest ways. This is largely due to age old superstitions which battle the logic of science in favor of a dogmatic, outdated and highly romanticized world view.
If we had the option to rebuild a society from scratch, how would we do it to make it the most efficient, sustainable and humane? This is our perspective. Obviously, we cannot build a society from scratch but the point is clear. It is time we stop thinking about monetary concerns and limitations, and begin to think about the possibilities we have here on earth in the broadest sense.
It is this interest that has created the concept of a 'Resource Based Economy'. The Venus project has been working on this concept for a long time and its foundation is very simple. We survey, preserve and maximize our use of planetary resources in conjunction with open information and technological development.
In this view, little is left to subjective interpretation, for it is a scientifically derived strategy for social construction at the very core. From there, the scientific parameters work themselves out as far as possibilities.
www.zeitgeistmovement.com
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2 comments:
In many ways, the creation of money was the downfall of humanity - at least the "humanity" that you describe as being the apex of the race. Would people today perform labor if they were not made to? My guess is not until their lives depended on it.
The pursuit of interests without extrinsic reward is a notion that has become lost to society. It is not until we have nothing that we truly understand the importance of having a purpose in life.
You have been brought up to believe people are inspired by rewards or money.
In essence all of the people we have admired in the past, Michael Angelo, da Vinci, Bell, the Wright Brothers, Darwin, and many others worked because they were interested in problem solving, not financial gain. This in some cases was a by-product. Usually money-oriented people become business men, or stock brokers; they are rarely creative. I have always felt threatened by people whose sole motivation is financial gain. On islands in the South Pacific, people had more than enough resources. Although banana, coconuts, fish and breadfruit were abundant, the natives worked continuously building navigation equipment, canoes, huts, and weaved cloth. Although no money was used, their incentive improved their standard of living.
In the early days in America a man and wife could build a log cabin in several months. Today it takes 30 years or so to pay off a house with the additional funds to bankers and others that actually have nothing to do with the building of the house.
Of people who have access to all the necessities of life you will find that many wealthy people do not eat 25 meals a day even though they have access to it and they do not stuff their environment with hundreds of musical instruments and accumulate hundreds of cars. It is not the availability of resources that is disturbing to people, it is the lack of resources that is responsible for most crimes, embezzlement, deception of all kinds, etc.
Consider this when few nations control most of the worlds resources and exploit other nations with their positions of differential advantage.
All of the technical staff and everyone else will have access to a very high standard of living; the incentive, which will propel people, is the end of war, territorial disputes, economic hardship, debt, and the basis for most crimes as they will all be eliminated. In this new society as proposed by The Venus Project, the environment in which people are raised and educated will be based upon the fundamental principles of science and the comprehensive knowledge of the interrelationship between people and the environment, which sustains all life.
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