[First Draft]
Typically the central characteristic of a dystopia is a lack of awareness. Broad unawareness of the evils of society, although not necessary, are often sufficient for producing or maintaining a state of dystopia.
I am here to tell you today that we are living in one of the greatest dystopias ever to exist on this planet, and The West's denial of this catastrophe only further solidifies this fact.
The Dystopia
John Maynard Keynes, the genius best known for a modern economic theory that has hijacked and perverted his work*, predicted that by 2030, we would have a 15 hour work week. Why? based on an incredibly conservative estimate of the growth of capital and the development of technology, the need of labour required per person to survive would drop considerably over time.
Unfortunately, during this same time, theories of "underconsumption" were popularized; the absurd theory that having more than enough would cause a collapse of the economy. Any ration person would clearly see that the solution to this supposed problem of too much stuff is simply to work less... you know... so you have less of the thing that is causing the problem... but what do you really expect from a theory that was first created by the Mercantile Class? Essentially a group of elitists controlling the economy that blamed their over-investment in capital on the labourers they enslaved to these machines back in the 1600s. Yes, that's right, we have been making too much stuff since about the 1600s (although, back then the population was less bloated, we had a habit of theft, and we enslaved people, so it's not quite the same thing).
The solution to this under-consumption thought up by the overexposed elitist culture? Work just as hard, and make up for a lack of need by creating desires. Conspicuous consumption, something seen only among the rich, was to be encouraged among the working class.
This is our prison. Let me show you the chains, not by pointing to them directly, as they are hidden well, but by showing you what we are not benefiting from.
The industrial/fuel revolution was probably the turning point of humanity that I discuss in the earlier post titled Spiritual Materialism. At this point, everything else is gravy. Since then we have seen:
- The Automation/Robotics revolutions (with huge gains still going strong since the industrial revolution)
- The Computer Revolution - (again, still going strong and in fact, growing geometrically, just like what should be happening but is not in many of these revolutions) the computer revolution is so broad it contains in itself multiple revolutions
- The Digital revolution - A part of the computer revolution, the digital revolution greatly expands the capacity and efficiency of previously analog systems because it removes unneeded information present in analog signals and enables compression. This allowed us to go from radio communication which can not possibly supply everyone with communication devices, to wifi, which supplies seemingly infinite information over a relatively small band.**
- The Telecommunication Revolution - (the wired revolution)
- The Wireless Revolution
- The Internet Revolution - Enough can not be said about how massive an effect this failed to have on labour, the cost of communication around the entire globe is now so cheap we can be considered to be free for all intents and purposes. In addition, all the greatest knowledge of mankind can be access immediately from your pocket, again, at little or no cost (especially if you are willing to break copyright law)
- Globalization - Including but not limited to access to markets that were original very inefficient (net gain of productivity overall) and even after being made efficient it is still a cheap source of labour (a gain to The West)***. This too is a meta revolution and represents multiple different revolutions.
- Centralization and Amalgamation (more so for corporations than for governments, since many governments were already very centralized at the point of time I am comparing to)
- Psychology, Organizational Behaviour, and Propaganda - All have been particularly useful at having the population aligned to a common goal that reduces internal conflict and competition that is counter productive)
- Women in the workforce - A substantial increase of the size of the labour force relative to the population.
- Alleged Stock Market and Finance Revolutions
- Alleged Education Revolutions
- Medical Revolutions - Including vaccines, which are incredibly cheap and solve many of the problems associated with weak immune systems and diseases resulting hyper-dense populations and/or unhygienic populations.
- Knowledge in general has increased exponentially and has become incredibly cheap (because it cost almost nothing to create and distribute at this point)
Each one of these revolution had the potential of substantially reducing the need for the 40 hour work week. Each failed in this.
And what do we have to show if not reduced working hours?
With all this additional productivity, we must be getting something out of it. Right?
Well, people say civilization has a cost, but what does civilization actually offer?
We live marginally longer than we did hundreds of years ago; often the average life expectancy that is thrown around based on survival after the womb (adding the years of all the people born and dividing it by the number of people). A vast majority of this "average" is just a reflection of infant mortality caused by poor nutrition (which was caused by the agricultural revolution restricting us to cheap and easy to grow food), terrible terrible hygiene (a phenomena that did not exist in many ancient civilizations and ancient cultures), and disease in general, exacerbated by high density populations. This means that few people actually died at these "average ages", they either died very early on, or much much later. In addition, the advances to solve these problems are also incredibly cheap, so you can not argue that we need to work hard to pay for that gain. And let me clarify, if you can read this, chances are you are above the age of infant mortality, and if you lived 200 years ago, you would have a decent chance of living well into your 60's and 70's. The 10 or 20 years you may have gained over yourself from the 1800s (or even older) is due to the resolution of the same problems that caused infant mortality. The other reason we live longer is because of a reduction in homicide and war. The reduction of these also carries no cause (or even a net gain) unless the mechanism you use to resolve conflict is police state measure, in which case, it is very expensive.
Other things to consider:
Even if working this hard was the only way to live to 80 years of age, it is an incredibly dumb trade off. If work is so displeasureable to the majority of the population that it doesn't count as living, then you are actually spending more of your life than you are gaining, and what do you really gain? You are adding to the oldest years of your life, not the youngest, in fact, we make it a point to sacrifice our youth for no particularly good reason with the creation of mass schooling and assembly line education, which, for the most part, is so useless that 12 to 16 years of "education" and chances are you are still just as useless as someone fresh off the boat from god knows where. Added to this, depression, anxiety, and most other psychiatric illnesses have either dramatically increased or are at least on the rise, so the life worth living feels shitty and shitty to more and more people.
It is important to keep in mind that many of these revolutions cost almost nothing to implement (even if they cost a lot at first to develop) so it is impossible to claim that we still need to work hard in order to maintain these gains in nutrition, medicine, knowledge, technology, etc...
*Much in the same way Adam Smiths work has been used to justify perverse models that he himself would obviously reject outright based on even the most cursory reading of his work. I encourage you to read the theories presented by both geniuses from their original work if you wish to understand actual economic theories, or what would be more appropriately called "economic philosophies".
** I can't be bothered to compare how much of a band radio takes up in the air, vs wifi, that is why I said relative rather than absolute... maybe it is absolute, go figure it out yourself
*** it is important to identify actual increase in productivity separate from actions that can be argued to be parasitic, or quasi-parasitic, otherwise, you can not tell from the balance sheet if things are getting better, or if you are just taking someone elses stuff.
Recommended Resources:
The Century of the Self - BBC Documentary (watch all 4 parts)
Anything by Edward Bernays
Divergence (2014) - An artistic representation of the concepts highlighted in the above documentary series - it's kinda a shitty movie, but awesome if you watch that documentary first.
I will expand this list as I remember where I learned stuff from...
Other things to check out to understand the potential of humans:
Germany before, during, and after WWII (keep in mind, they were either broke or completely destroyed before doing these things)
The Asian Tigers
China's development in the past 20 years
I'm sure there are other examples, I'll add them later.
Shit I've been looking at as I write this:
(I didn't read all this, it's just I'm lazy right now and figured I'd post everything for my own sake as well)
http://thefinalrevelation.blogspot.ca/2014/09/spiritual-materialism.html
http://ilo.org/global/publications/magazines-and-journals/world-of-work-magazine/articles/ilo-in-history/WCMS_143114/lang--en/index.htm
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/sep/01/economics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_unemployment
http://money.howstuffworks.com/five-day-weekend2.htm
https://soundcloud.com/stagedoorfm/from-the-vault-hippie-sabotage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underconsumption
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/general-theory/ch23.htm#vii
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspicuous_consumption
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahvSgFHzJIc
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Motor_Company#20th_century
My next look at this topic will focus on our chains.
Let there be Light...
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