The Lamp

After being positive about economics since starting Buddhist thinking I picked up a book in the library [name] which took a critical position against corporate capitalism and reading a chapter it reinforced my thinking that it is not only corporate capitalism that can be criticised but the whole edifice of modern dogma can be crumbled to dust with only the most trivial of arguments. As argued the only reason it survives is because of the status quo and power structures rather than any inherent logic. It led me by thoughts I've forgotten to The Lamp - a short story I'm supposed to be writing now but diverted to a blog entry instead...

So there is the legend of the desert jin trapped in lamps by sorcerers. On release they are bound to grant their liberator a wish. Now imagine that we are introduced to a world whether these jin are not bound to give a single wish or three, but a world were wishes all come true - an extraordinary palace in the sky and like Marco Polo we live there a while experiencing what it is like to have our hearts desire instantly without working, shopping or having to wait for technological progress. My argument at this stage is that we would not grow weary for lack of work! The argument that we instinctively like work is instantly disproved if you say to a rich person "park your own car" (which is a reasonable implication of personal property and responsibility) and this also instantly proves that having money is simply to pay people to do work you would otherwise do yourself or not at all. So in The Palace this is not an issue and we can feel the freedom from labour that we never dare to dream, or feel guilty for dreaming. Now we discover the truth that there is no free lunch and there is another place The Prison where enslaved creatures have to work to produce all the gifts in the Palace. The challenge for our hero is whether to turn a blind eye or to somehow break the system... not decided what he does... obviously we don't really want to break the system because it would mean the 1st world having to live like the 3rd world, but maybe there is a smart solution... shall consider... standard economic argument is that capitalism creates wealth so we can all live like the 1st world...altho I rather think the truth is that western society uses cheap oil and technological advances to mass produce cheap goods with high income for the few capitalists, low labour costs and therefore little wealth distributed to everyone else. Once the poor need a job then the capitalists can get them to do anything they want... like park their cars.

Just on the absurdity of modern dogma regarding work. People talk about work like it was gold, but if someone gave you some gold you would be happy while if they gave you some work you would be unhappy. If work was really so valuable then why do we like something in return? Whenever we ask for something in return it means we feel we have lost something that we wish to have back. Work makes us feel like we have lost something, it is not something that provides us with worth in itself. We don't work the fields for 6 hours for no reason; it is because we wish to enjoy the fruits of that labour. The fruit is what we want not the work. It is a remarkably simple point yet one that seems to have got people in the Christian world very confused. If you do not want the fruit then don't do the work. Or alternatively if the fruit has already been harvested then you don't need to do any work... except that ownership arrangements mean that you can't enjoy the harvest unless you were in someway involved in reaping it and if the harvest was reaped by a single person with an army of machines you have no right to the harvest. People only say they want to work because this is the only way to get access to the harvest, but the work they do is arbitrary and unnecessary in any causal sense; the link between work and fruit is only maintained by the artificial rules of a man made game that ensures huge wealth and power to a few owners (capitalists) who no longer need to work. Again I repeat this is so trivial that a preschool child can see this is how it works - yet centuries of indoctrination have twisted the minds of the dependent class (who depend upon capitalists for work) so that there is a great call for people to work as though it was some God given imperative wholly dislocated from the fruits of that labour. As argued at length, in this blog, in reality the continual advance of technology over history (especially the shifts to agriculture and then oil energy) have been leading to the opposite argument which is a reduction in the link between labour and fruit, and a reduction in the amount of work that can be done. If people really do like working we need to go back to the days of smashing up the machines so that humans can once again do labour again. The creation of document jobs (legal, accounts, banking, administration) which basically just build rules upon rules and entrench people in indefinitely large bureaucratic structures is one way to create labour because these jobs don't actually do anything and just waste human time and effort. I have spent many hours for example watching stock markets so I can make investments - in the end wins and losses mostly balance and all that time and effort equates to nothing. A wonderful waste of time. Labour is only one of the huge frauds that mankind manifests against itself simply because it has to keep busy for one reason or another. Something I certainly wish to end (without creating too much work in the process). What is needed is a smart solution to The Lamp (indeed the real light of the lamp rather than the Jin of capitalism).