Elements of Utopia

I haven't written in a while, because I was pondering my mission.  My stated goal is to come up with a better way to live, for the individual and for the world, but so far, all I have done is rant about the insanity of our current civilization (or lack thereof).

The plain truth is, I like ranting.  I believe in the power of the rant.  I think it is important to explain why the world we live in couldn't be better set up for crime, mental illness and poverty than if it were specifically designed that way.

But at some point, I have to present an alternative to crazy, so here it is.

Utopia, 0.1 beta test version:

The Trouble with Scaling Down

There's a problem I've noticed in a Capitalist economy.  The people who manufacture and distribute goods can only give the people what they want if they are capable of understanding it.  And one thing they can't seem to understand at all, is scaling things down.

Business leaders often must be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the things that revolutionize our way of life.

A Slave's-eye View of Wage Slavery

Fredrick Douglass was a slave.  An escaped slave.  He was a man who knew a thing or two about slavery.

In the early days of his freedom, on taking a paying job, he said, "Now I am my own master."  But after the war, when he saw the condition of former slaves change very little, and often not for the better, he said,

"Experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other."

Debt Farming: The Money Crop

If you wanted to go about farming people, the most efficient imaginable crop would be debt farming.

People used to call debt, "The Devil's handshake."  You don't hear that one much these days, but it's still true.  Of course we don't mean the red devil with horns and a pitchfork anymore.  Today's devil is a bank, which farms people like they were crops.

Rehumanize Yourself

"I work all day at the factory
I'm building a machine that's not for me
There must be a reason that I can't see
You've got to humanise yourself"
     -The Police, "Rehumanize Yourself"

I love this song.  Look up the rest of the words.  There is so much of the darkest side of people, that is just vommited to the surface when people's lives become meaningless mechanical employments.

Discuss amongst yourselves.

Why Can't I Just Go Home; the Anti-Economics of Busywork

We are told that the business of business is profit.  That it is all about the bottom line.  I'm not buying it.

Example:

A very, very small thought.

Capitalism is where those with capital, own the means of production.

Communism is where the workers own the means of production.

What happens when the means of production become so inexpensive that the workers can buy them?

Maybe the -isms all disappear in a puff of logic?

On the Farming of Humans

Do you wonder why people of all kinds in all places hate their jobs? 

Not everyone, of course, but most of us.  Even the ones that claim to love their jobs seem suspicious to me, like they are trying too hard to convince someone, perhaps themselves.

For three million years, give or take a few hundred thousand, there have been humans living quite nicely.  And none of them had jobs.  At least, not until the last ten thousand years or so.

A Better Tomorrow

There are many people who will tell you what's wrong with the world.  And nearly as many who will tell you what we need to do and how we need to live.  But they are often quite vague on particulars, and extremely vague on how to get from here to there.

So this is my task: