Time To Finally Abolish Slavery

[NOTE: These posts are an ongoing presentation, meant to be read beginning with the earliest and ending with the most recent. If not read in that order, there is a potential loss for the reader in an overall understanding of what is being presented. You have been warned.]

Now, if we live in a world where everyone is paid $1,000/year times their age, someone might say, “but that won’t work because nobody will want to work anymore and how will we get anything done.” Well, my first realization of the ridiculousness of that claim came about 35 years ago. It was back in my hippy trippy days. I was publisher of an underground/alternative monthly rag called The Razzberry Radicle. I had rented a large house from which to run our activities and in which to live. The house managed to have 7 bedrooms so we had as many as a dozen people living in the house (at one point we even had 3 people who claimed to be part of the Weathermen Underground living in our garage).

Two of the people who lived with us for a time were Frank and Valerie. To the best of my recollection, the only clothes that Frank ever wore was a pair of denim shorts. No shirt, no shoes, just shorts, 365 days a year, in Dayton, Ohio, where it gets cold in the winter. Well, one day we had a house crisis. The sewer had backed up into our basement and there was stuff floating everywhere. What were the poor hippies to do? Well, never fear. Without even being asked, Frank grabbed a shovel and a broom and got right to it. I’d say that he hiked up his pants, but when your pants are shorts, there’s not much to hike. And shoes? No time for such fluff. He just waded into it barefoot and cleaned it all up. And, my friends, I learned a very important lesson that day: no matter what happens, there will always be people who willingly will shovel shit.

You see, there is a difference between work and a job. There are people who work for the joy of working, and then there are those who work because they have to, because it’s expected of them, because they need to work in order to survive in this upsidedown economy that dominates every aspect of our lives. Some of my friends in Amway used to say that a job was short for Just Over Broke. How true that is for so many people. Bucky Fuller often referred to the “job obsession” of our economy as “justifying your existence.” Decades ago I left my “job” and began “working.” Now, I had originally started out working, but then one day I cut my hair and I got a job working for someone else and it wasn’t long before I found that the job began to stifle my work ethic.

Believe it or not, “job” is a relatively recent invention on the human scene. Prior to jobs most everybody worked. They grew stuff, they tended animals, they cut trees and cleared land, they built houses and small buildings. I’m sure you get the idea. And what did most of those endeavors have in common? Well, they didn’t usually have a “boss.” Each person was essentially their own boss, and people worked together, cooperated, and shared.

Now when it came to big work requiring lots of people to accomplish a large task, there needed to be a hierarchy of organization so that all of the work could be coordinated. As far as the manpower necessary to accomplish the project, in the distant past that was handled by people who were slaves, who were in servitude to a “boss,” the slave “owner.” This was one of the early reasons for war, to conquer others and turn them into slaves, into laborers for the victor. That’s how most of the palaces, mansions, and monuments of the past were built, with slave labor. Of course we don’t have that today. Or do we? Do we? Does slavery still exist?

Well, we know from United Nations stats that there is a huge sex slave trade in the world today. But, not in the United States. Right? Not since the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves almost 150 years ago. Right? Did you ever wonder, or did they ever teach you in school, who took the place of the slaves once they were freed? And what happened to the slaves once they were no longer bound to the “former” slave owners?

The answer is, of course, that many of the “former slaves” were able to secure employment working for their “former masters.” The master now had to “pay” them for their “services,” but out of that “pay” the former slaves had to figure out how to provide the necessities of food, clothing and shelters that were previously provided by the slave masters. It’s very clever when one thinks about it. The former “slave owners” were able to escape any responsibility for caring for their “former slaves” by “paying” the “former slaves” to take over responsibility for their own lives. And the work went on. So the work, in many cases in the short run, and most cases in the long run, was conducted by the same people who had done it before. But now they were free. They were free to spend and to consume and to get into debt. They were free to bear the responsibility for their lives even if the cards were stacked against them.

Driven by new technological methods of product production, the market for the manpower to drive this growing capitalist machine looked to the people who were “free” to work. A chicken in every pot. A job for everyone. Let’s hear it for America. Rah! Rah! Rah! Get a Job! Sha Na Na Nah! The Great American Dream! A job for everyone, working to keep the dream alive. And please, God, don’t let us wake up.

Now, what I’ve just gotten through trying to say in a kind way, I’m now going to say, in very blunt terminology. It has slowly come to my attention that the great Capitalist American way is one of massive slavery, but “Shhh! Don’t let the slaves know!” Bucky was right. The greatly touted “American work ethic” is part of a marketing strategy designed to “train” us, to “condition” us, through the capitalistic “public” educational training system without having to acknowledge that we are slaves. And we’ve been tricked into taking full responsibility for our own well-being. That’s why Bucky says that having a job is the way we “justify our existence.” And justified to whom? Why to the system that keeps us enslaved. Of course, the capitalist system is healthiest when there are more people looking for work than there are jobs available for them. And if you are a PhD, and the only job you can get is a job flipping burgers (even if you don’t take it) then there is no unemployment problem.

Now, as I’ve said, I have nothing against work. I, personally, am a hard worker. I mow lawns, I paint, I move furniture, I do handy man work. I teach. I write. I maintain a home. I do accounting. I perform weddings. I do computer trouble shooting. And I figure out the solutions to problems, from the very small to the extremely large. And in the midst of all of that, for the overwhelming majority of the last 45 years, I have had one or more “jobs” at any given point in time. I agree with Kahlil Gibran when he says, in “The Prophet” that “work is love made visible.” But I resent the major economic systems upon this planet, whether capitalist, socialist, communist, fascist, or whatever, that have taken that beautiful expression of love in humankind to work, and corrupted it into a commodity that is bought and sold in the marketplace, and the overall wellbeing of the “worker” be damned.

So I’m looking for ways to liberate that inborn work ethic from the limitations of selfish, corrupt, short-sighted economic systems. I have a tremendous faith in the practically unanimous desire of all of humanity to do the right thing and to live a good and personally fulfilling life. I want to break the chains of slavery that have been imposed by society’s economic systems. And then I want to work at designing and making available ways for people to rediscover who they are, the incredible creation that has been hidden under centuries of indentured servitude and to share that reality to the benefit of themselves and others.

And that brings us to education. Wherever I go, I always run into people who are “aware” of the fact that the Latin root of the word “education” is “educare” and that educare means “to draw forth.” In spite of that “knowledge,” however, our culture appears to continue upon a course wherein we continually attempt to try to “force knowledge” into, and upon, others under the guise of “education.” Of course if our culture is not really interested in facilitating individuals “discovering” who and what they are, and in doing what they enjoy doing best, as human beings’ innate curiosity, creativity, and native intelligence would imply that they were designed to do, but instead intends to train people, rather than to educate them, to fill the ever-burgeoning slots in the international corporate machine, then the future does not bode well for the existence of humanity.

Knowledge has long been used as a tool to exercise power over others. An example, shared with us by Bucky Fuller, concerns the “cipher.” Now, I’ll have to admit that when I first heard this story I didn’t really know what a cipher was. Maybe that’s because it’s really no big thing. It’s really a 0. It’s nothing. Zero. The lowly cipher. But there’s so much more to the story. And please note that as important as this story is, it’s principles are not taught in the educational system. So here’s how it goes down.

In the evolvement of humanity, people learned how to count. Don’t know about you, but my brain spends a great deal of time counting. I think that it must be something that it does when bored, sort of like playing solitaire. In order to count, we needed a “counting machine,” a calculator, to not only assist us in keeping track of our counting but as a way of agreeing with others upon the results of our counting. Of course the obvious first “universal calculator” would be our fingers and then our toes.

Well, fingers and toes are fine for small accounting, but what happens if one is dealing with quantities larger than 20? Well, the Arabs came up with a way to handle this, and their “secret” was brought back to the “west” by merchants who learned the secret while conducting business in their travels. That secret was the “cipher.” The cipher is a place holder that allows paper accounting. This is important, for it allows one to count beyond fingers and toes, to count beyond 20. If one can count past 20, one can get involved in larger business transactions without getting burned. And that means the possibility of greater wealth and greater power. It’s numeric literacy. And just as with alphabetic literacy, reading and writing, numeric/mathematic literacy is a gateway to greater opportunity.

Because of the possibilities offered through use of the knowledge of the cipher, its existence was kept secret in the West for centuries. There were, believe it or not, times when the mere knowledge of the cipher and its use was a crime punishable by death. I give this as an example of the importance of education and of the fact that access to educational opportunities can be subject to control and manipulation.

And that’s precisely what happened with the advent of the industrial revolution. As we’ve discussed earlier, work was originally an individual endeavor. People did what they did. They worked as a part of the survival equation. They worked for themselves and for their families. In many parts of the world, life is still like that. That’s the way it has been for thousands of years. But then the industrial equation reared its head and thousands of years of business as usual began to change.

Whether you are aware of it or not, and whether you believe it or not, that is one of the biggest reasons that Osama Bin Laden and many other terrorists hate America so much. It’s because we have a tendency to export our way of life to other countries, and that has a way of corrupting, and otherwise destroying, their way of life, a life that hasn’t changed much in thousands of years. That is until “we” came along with the capitalist promise in one hand and a flaming sword in the other.

It’s a fact that the overwhelming majority of the people on this planet have always worked. Humanity would not have survived otherwise. And the work that different people performed in various cultures became entwined in that culture and the ethic was passed on from generation to generation to generation. That’s a beneficial thing for the people, for the culture, and, unfortunately, for those who would dominate those people. And that’s the way it continued for thousands of years. And it would have gone on that way except for one small thing: humanity’s innate curiosity.

It’s a stone cold fact that every single human being is born naked, ignorant, and curious. Our nakedness makes us vulnerable and drives our curiosity to discover ways that we can survive and thrive. As we each explore this new environment into which we are thrust at birth, sometimes yanked, sometimes kicking, sometimes screaming, we discover that we must develop patterned responses to the stimuli around us or else go mad from a constant stream of the unknown and the unexpected. These gradually habitual pattern responses leave us free to explore new experiences and lifelong education begins, years before the artificial, manmade educational imitation called “school” and many months or even years before we first develop the ability to converse intelligently with the other human beings around us.

Our curiosity-driven, lifelong education is key to the success of our embracing the new economy. For that reason, education needs a thorough reexamination and the development of a whole new educational paradigm. So hang on, because what I’m about to share with you might shock you.