Although I’ve bought land, I’m not a specialist. This information is mostly second-hand.
Finding and Buying Your Place in the Country show

1. To do it right, get the book Finding and Buying Your Place in the Country, by Les Scher. In addition to the money to buy the land, you need the money and time to have access to a car and spend months driving around looking at properties and looking up information about titles, water, easements, zoning laws, building codes, mineral rights, contracts, and so on and so on. Doing it right is too hard for most people to do alone. Better to buy with a group or find a shortcut. Still, at least look at Scher’s book!

2. If you’re going to buy with a group, choosing the members of that group is even more important than choosing the land. One energy vampire, one person who’s contributing more money and demands more respect or decision-making power, one person who can’t take criticism or won’t compromise, even one person with a selfish and competitive view of reality, and your group is doomed. If you’re lucky it will fall apart before you buy the land. I think one happy-dog person, friendly and easy-going but undisciplined, will add to a group, but two is too many. You need at least one person who’s good at working out conflicts between the other people, and at least one person who’s good with numbers.

3. The most common group-land-buying disaster goes like this: after a few years someone wants out, and wants to be paid their share of the land’s current value — but it’s gone way up, and the other people don’t have the money. So you have to sell your Eden to developers just so one asshole can make a profit. If you do not have a contract to prevent this, it’s almost certain to happen. You must all agree in writing that if someone wants out, they get, at most, what they paid in.

4. Buy within your means. I strongly recommend you save up money and pay cash for the land. Loans are difficult to get, stressful, expensive, and multiply the things that can go wrong. Even if the seller will take gradual payment, it’s more expensive and consumes psychic energy. Save up a bunch of money, set a maximum, and then push down from that maximum, not up.

5. Think through what you want. For example, I wanted the following things: a) It has to be at the top of the watershed, or so close to the top that there’s no risk of anyone putting shit or toxins in the water or draining it dry before it gets to me. b) There must be surface water on the land, a spring or stream, that runs at least part of the year. c) At least 5 acres, ideally 10, 20 would be a miracle at my price, which is… d) $8000-$15,000. e) Not too many north-facing slopes. f) Accessible by road, with an easement, which is a legal right to cross other people’s property. g) The more remote, the better.

6. Think through what you don’t care about. You get a better deal if you don’t buy features you don’t want. I didn’t care about: a) View. b) Soil quality — I can build it with composting. c) Natural beauty. I was all ready to get ugly depleted land and bring it back, though it turned out I didn’t need to go that far to get in my price range.

7. Choose negatives! The way to get a really good deal is to think of features that lower the price that you don’t care about, or even that you prefer, and actively look for those things! In my case, these were: a) No utilities. I want to be off the grid. b) No buildings. I want to build my own. c) Land that’s just been logged. I preferred land that was naturally forested, but I knew I couldn’t afford land that was actually covered with big trees, so logged land was ideal. I was willing to take a clearcut, but I was lucky enough to find land that had only been selectively logged.

8. Do not get “land fever.” If you’re overwhelmed with desire to just get on some land right now, you will not get a good deal. You can practice this just buying cheap stuff on ebay: the more patient you are, and the more auctions you are willing to lose, the better deal you will eventually get. Also, land fever tends to make you ignore red flags. A few years ago I almost bought into overpriced waterless land with a group that was young, undisciplined, likely to default on the payments, and already squabbling — just because I was excited to pull the trigger and get on some land.

9. Don’t fall in love. Unless you have more than $50,000, don’t hold out for a piece of land that you are in love with, because you can’t afford it. And don’t fall in love with a piece you’ve seen, or refer to it as “my land” or “our land,” until you actually own it. If you do, you are setting yourself up for the bait-and-switch, for ignoring red flags, for wishing yourself into a bad deal or a disaster. Kenny Rogers said it best: “You never count your money when you’re sittin’ at the table. There’ll be time enough for countin’ when the dealin’s done.”

10. Use your connections. Tell family, friends, friends of family, family of friends, and friends of friends, what you are looking for, and if you’re lucky, someone will have a piece of land, or know of one, that is what you want. Then you can deal directly with the seller, who might be someone you know and trust, and you can cut out the real estate agent and a lot of precautions you would have to take with a stranger. This is how I got my land with almost no work — my mom has a close friend who buys and sells primitive land. I was very lucky, but you might be even luckier, if your family has land that they’re willing to give you free!

11. Before you start looking, research prices on the internet. It takes some time. The “multiple listing service” is some kind of giant database that you can supposedly search through any of a bunch of sites, but they are generally unusable and full of ads. I suggest you begin with a google search for: multiple listing acreage, without quotes, and then the state you’re looking in, and go from there.

12. Real estate agents are a nasty pack of liars. “Buyer’s agents” and “seller’s agents” all work for the same person: themselves, trying to sell property as quickly as possible for as much money as possible so they can rake in the commissions. If you ask for a low price, they will ridicule you for thinking you can find anything that cheap. But their own book of listings will have several properties that cheap! Then they will repeatedly try to seduce you into going higher, by showing you land that is above your price range but that you will fall in love with. They do this because it works on most people. They will also say, this land is just about to sell so you have to hurry and buy now. It might be true, but the point is, they will always say it whether it’s true or not, so their words mean nothing.

13. You can get a great deal by buying “problem” land, if you have the time and skills to solve the problem that scared off other buyers — or if you don’t care about it. One of the best things to find on a piece of land is junked cars — magical nuggets of price-lowering!

A Blessed Journey to the Past … or to the Future?
Are there places where people still live in Paradise?

source of below: http://ranprieur.com/essays/beyondciv.html
Western industrial society tells a story about itself that goes like this: “A long time ago, our ancestors were ‘primitive.’ They lived in caves, were stupid, hit each other with clubs, and had short, stressful lives in which they were constantly on the verge of starving or being eaten by saber-toothed cats. Then we invented ‘civilization,’ in which we started growing food, being nice to each other, getting smarter, inventing marvelous technologies, and everywhere replacing chaos with order. It’s getting better all the time and will continue forever.”

Western industrial society is now in decline, and in declining societies it’s normal for people to feel that their whole existence is empty and meaningless, that the system is rotten to its very roots and should all be torn up and thrown out. It’s also normal for people to frame this rejection in whatever terms their society has given them. So we reason: “This world is hell, this world is civilization, so civilization is hell, so maybe primitive life was heaven. Maybe the whole story is upside-down!”

We examine the dominant story and find that although it contains some truth, it depends on assumptions and distortions and omissions, and it was not designed to reveal truth, but to influence the values and behaviors of the people who heard it. Seeking balance, we create a perfect mirror image:

“A long time ago, our ancestors were ‘primitive.’ They were just as smart as we would be if we didn’t watch television, and they lived in cozy hand-made shelters, were generally peaceful and egalitarian, and had long healthy lives in which food was plentiful because they kept their populations well below the carrying capacity of their landbase. Then someone invented ‘civilization,’ in which we monopolized the land and grew our population by eating grain. Grain is high in calories but low in other nutrients, so we got sick, and we also began starving when the population outgrew the landbase, so the farmers conquered land from neighboring foragers and enslaved them to build sterile monuments while the elite developed an empty death culture, and invented technologies of repression and disconnection and gluttonous consumption, and everywhere life was replaced with control. It’s been getting worse and worse, and soon we will abandon it and live the way we did before.”

Again, this story contains truth, but it depends on assumptions and distortions and omissions, and it is designed to influence the values and behaviors of the people who hear it. Certainly it’s extremely compelling. As a guiding ideology, as a utopian vision, primitivism can destroy Marxism or libertarianism because it digs deeper and overthrows their foundations. It defeats the old religions on evidence. And best of all, it presents a utopia that is not in the realm of imagination or metaphysics, but has actually happened. We can look at archaeology and anthropology and history and say: “Here’s a forager-hunter society where people were strong and long-lived. Here’s a tribe where the ‘work’ is so enjoyable that they don’t even have the concept of ‘freeloading.’ Here are European explorers writing that certain tribes showed no trace of violence or meanness.”

But this strength is also a great weakness, because reality cuts both ways. As soon as you say, “We should live like these actual people,” every competing ideologue will jump up with examples of those people living dreadfully: “Here’s a tribe with murderous warfare, and one with ritual abuse, and one with chronic disease from malnutrition, and one where people are just mean and unhappy, and here are a bunch of species extinctions right when primitive humans appeared.”

Most primitivists accept this evidence, and have worked out several ways to deal with it. One move is the old trick that astronomers call dark matter: postulate something that has not been observed yet, but that if it were observed, would make the facts fit your theory. Specifically, they say “The nasty tribes must have all been corrupted by exposure to civilization.” Another move is to defend absolutely everything on the grounds of cultural relativism: “Who are we to say it’s wrong to hit another person in the head with an axe?” Another move is to say, “OK, some of that stuff is bad, but if you add up all the bad and good, primitive life is still preferable to civilization.”

This is hardly inspiring, and it still has to be constantly defended, and not from a strong position, because we know very little about prehistoric life. We know what tools people used, and what they ate, but we don’t know how many tribes were peaceful or warlike, how many were permissive or repressive, how many were egalitarian or authoritarian, and we have no idea what was going on in their heads. One of the assumptions I mentioned above, made by both primitivism and the dominant story, is that stone age people were the same as tribal forager-hungers observed in historical times. After all, we call them both “primitive.” But in terms of culture, and even consciousness, they might be profoundly different.

A more reasonable move is to abandon primitive life as an ideal, or a goal, and instead just set it up as a perspective: “Hey, if I stand here, I can see that my own world, which I thought was normal, is totally insane!” Or we can set it up as a source of learning: “Look at this one thing these people did, so let’s see if we can do it too.” Then it doesn’t matter how many flaws they had. And once we give up the framework that shows a right way and a wrong way, and a clear line between them, we can use perspectives and ideas from people formerly on the “wrong” side: “Ancient Greeks went barefoot everywhere and treated their slaves with more humanity than Wal-Mart treats its workers. Medieval serfs worked fewer hours than modern Americans, and thought it was degrading to work for wages. Slum-dwellers in Mumbai spend less time and effort getting around on foot than Americans spend getting around in cars. The online file sharing community is building a gift economy.”

Identifying with stone age people is like taking a big stretch. Then if we relax, we find that a lot of smaller stretches are effortless, that we can easily take all kinds of perspectives outside the assumptions of our little bubble. We could even re-invent “primitivism” to ignore stone age people and include only recent tribes who we have good information about, and who still stack up pretty well against our own society. We could call this historical primitivism, and a few primitivists have taken this position. The reason most don’t is, first, our lack of knowledge about prehistory forms a convenient blank screen on which anyone can project visions to back up their ideology. And second, stone age primitivism comes with an extremely powerful idea, which I call the timeline argument.

The timeline argument convinces us that a better way of life is the human default, that all the things we hate are like scratches in the sand that will be washed away when the tide comes in. Often it’s phrased as “99% of human history has been that, and only 1% has been this.” Sometimes it’s illustrated with a basketball court metaphor: It’s 94 feet long, and if you call each foot ten thousand years, then we had fire and stone tools for 93 feet, agriculture for one foot, and industrial society for around a quarter of an inch.

The key word in this argument is “we.” Where do you draw the line between “us” and “not us”? Why not go back a billion years, and say that “we” were cell colonies in the primordial oceans? Call a billion years a football field, and the age of agriculture can dance on the head of a pin! This would seem to be a much stronger argument, and yet I’ve never seen a primitivist draw the line even as far back as Homo habilis two million years ago — or as recently as Homo sapiens sapiens 130,000 years ago. Why not?

This is a difficult and important question, and it took me days to puzzle it out. I think we’ve been confusing two separate issues. One is a fact, that the present way we live is a deviation from the way of all biological life. If this is our point, then a million year timeline is much too short — we should go back at least a thousand times farther!

The other issue is a question: Who are we? When you get below the level of culture, down to the level of biology or spirit, what is the nature of us, right now? What is it possible for us to do? And what is normal for us to do, or what is our tendency?

If you’re talking about who we are, then the million year timeline is much too long. The mistake happens like this: “We are human, and we can plausibly call Homo erectus human. Therefore our nature is to live like Homo erectus, and the way we live now is not our tendency, not our normal behavior, but some kind of bizarre accident. What a relief! We can just bring down civilization, and we’ll naturally go back to living like Homo erectus, but since we don’t know how they lived, we’ll assume it’s like the very best recent forager-hunter tribes.

Now, I’m not disputing that many societies have lived close to the Earth with a quality of life that we can’t imagine. Richard Sorenson mentions several, and explores one in depth, in his essay on Preconquest Consciousness. What I’m disputing is: 1) that we have any evidence that prehistoric people had that consciousness; 2) that that consciousness is our default state; 3) that it is simple for us to get back there; and 4) that large-scale technologically complex societies are a deviation from who we are.

Who we are is changing all the time, and new genetic research has revealed shockingly fast change in just the last few thousand years, including malaria resistance, adult milk digestion, and blue eyes. According to anthropologist John Hawks, “We are more different genetically from people living 5000 years ago than they were from Neanderthals.” (link) And we should not assume that we have discovered every change, or that all of these changes will appear on the level of DNA. The “DNA as blueprint” hypothesis is duct tape science, a temporary patch for a subject we still know barely anything about. We know that DNA tells a cell how to make proteins, but the steps between that and a creature’s appearance, or instincts, or personality, remain blank.

Even the source of recent changes remains a mystery. Hawks thinks a larger population increased the number of mutations, but he presents no evidence — in fact, the very idea that evolution begins with random genetic mutation is purely speculative. Natural selection has been observed many times, but in this context it doesn’t fit, because in a technologically complex society with an increasing population, a lot of people survive who would otherwise be selected out.

I think Rupert Sheldrake is on the right track with his hypothesis of morphic fields: that our physical bodies are like tuners or filters for a causal level that we can’t see with our present fashion of inquiry. What we call “science” is just one way of building mental models from observation, and it’s based on a peculiar idea that was invented only a few hundred years ago: that the basis of all reality is matter, and that matter is fundamentally mindless. This doctrine is not itself scientific, but an untested assumption that tells us how to look at the world. Every culture makes untested assumptions, but every other culture puts mind, awareness, consciousness, God, pure being, whatever they call it, at the core, and sees physical matter as something on the surface.

Of course the mindlessness doctrine has been useful for industrial civilization, which ravages subjective experience to feed things that can be numbered and measured, like energy and capital and productivity. But ironically, it has also contributed a key doctrine to primitivism: that civilization was a fluke, that it began with a random accident. This is the twin of the doctrine that evolution begins with random genetic mutations, and the parent is the doctrine that mind must not underlie matter. If we need to explain why matter goes one way and not another way, and we’re not allowed to say it was mindful, then we invoke a god, an entity that can be neither proven nor disproven, which we call “chance.”

I suggest that “civilization” was not an accident, that some kind of deeper intelligence, possibly a human collective consciousness, was building up to it since the taming of fire. Now, just because something was not an accident, doesn’t mean it was not a mistake. We must avoid the New Age doctrine that if “everything happens for a reason,” it must be a good reason. This is even more disempowering than the dead mechanical universe, and pagan cultures do not think this way — their gods are always making huge blunders. Maybe our collective consciousness is now saying “Oh shit! I didn’t see this coming.” And even if we’re on a path through a dark canyon to a better world, there might be a much easier path along the ridge.

If you reject all this woo-woo stuff, there’s still a good mechanistic argument that civilization was not a fluke, but something humans became ready for. If it was a fluke, we would expect to see it begin only once, and spread from there. For a long time this was the dominant theory. The story was that people ate wild grains, and noticed that seeds they spilled in camp sprouted into new plants, and got the idea of growing them on purpose. Another story is that they understood the principle of grain farming for a while, but didn’t start doing it intensively until they were forced by either rising population or a climate catastrophe.

Recently this theory has shifted. It seems that the same innovations or pressures must have happened in several places at about the same time, because we see grain farming and explosions of human social complexity not just along the Tigris and Euphrates, but also in Africa, India, and China. You could still argue that those changes spread by travel, that there was one accident and then some far-flung colonies — unless we found an early civilization so remote that travel was out of the question.

That civilization has been found. Archaeologists call it the Norte Chico, in present-day Peru. From 3000-1800 BC, they built at least 25 cities, and they had giant stone monuments earlier than anyone except the Mesopotamians. Even more shocking, their system was not based on grain! All previous models of civilization have put grain agriculture at the very root: once you had grain farming, you had a denser, more settled population, which led to a more complex society, and also you had a storable commodity that enabled hierarchy.

The Norte Chicans barely even ate grain, but they did have a storable commodity that enabled hierarchy, something that allowed small differences in wealth to feed back into large differences, and ultimately entrenched elites commanding slaves to build monolithic architcture. It was cotton! So we have people on opposite sides of the world, in different geographies, using different materials, falling into the same pattern, but that pattern is not about food. It seems to be about economics, or more precisely, about human cognition. After thousands of generations of slow change, human nature reached a tipping point that permitted large complex societies to appear in radically different circumstances.

Now it’s tempting to call “civilization” the new human default, but of course, in many places, these societies did not appear. Also, they all collapsed! And then new ones appeared, and those collapsed.

I don’t think it even makes sense to talk about a human default, any more than it makes sense to talk about a default state for the weather. Just as there are regions where the weather is always the same, there are regions where the range of human society is severely limited. But in most of the world, human society is constantly shifting from one state to another. And on a deeper level, the states available to us are changing as our nature changes.

My information on the Norte Chico comes from Charles C. Mann’s book 1491, a survey of recent findings about the Americas before the European conquest. Mann is neither a primitivist nor an advocate for western civilization, but an advocate for, well, far western civilization, which was a lot more like western civilization than we thought. At its peak, the Inca empire was the largest in the world, with exploited colonies, massive forced resettling of workers, and bloody power struggles among the elite just like in Europe and Asia. The Mayans deforested the Yucatan and depleted its topsoil only a few centuries after the Romans did the same thing around the Mediterranean. Aztec “human sacrifice” was surprisingly similar to English “public execution” that was happening at exactly the same time. Even North America had a city, Cahokia, that in 1250 was roughly the size of London. In 1523, Giovanni da Verrazzano recorded that the whole Atlantic coast from the Carolinas up was “densely populated.” In the 1540′s, De Soto passed through what is now eastern Arkansas and found it “thickly set with great towns.” Of course, that population density is possible only with intensive agriculture. Mann writes, “A traveler in 1669 reported that six square miles of maize typically encircled Haudenosaunee villages.”

By the time the conquest really got going, all these societies had been wiped out by smallpox and other diseases introduced by the first Europeans. Explorers and conquerors found small tribes of forager-hunters in an untamed wilderness, and assumed it had been that way forever. In a blow to both primitivism and “progress,” it turns out that most of these people were not living in the timeless ways of their ancestors — the “Indians” of American myth were post-crash societies! It wasn’t the first crash either — civilizations had already been falling for thousands of years, and after long or short “dark” ages, rising.

The incredible biological abundance of North America was also a post-crash phenomenon. We’ve heard about the flocks of passenger pigeons darkening the sky for days, the tens of millions of bison trampling the great plains, the rivers so thick with spawning salmon that you could barely row a boat, the seashores teeming with life, the deep forests on which a squirrel could go from the Atlantic to the Mississippi without touching the ground. We don’t know what North America would have looked like with no humans at all, but we do know it didn’t look like that under the Indians. Bone excavations show that passenger pigeons were not even common in the 1400′s. Indians specifically targeted pregnant deer and wild turkeys before they laid eggs, to eliminate competition for maize and tree nuts. They routinely burned forests to keep them convenient for human use. And they kept salmon and shellfish populations down by eating them, and thereby suppressed populations of other creatures that ate them. When human populations crashed, nonhuman populations exploded.

This fact drives a wedge between value systems that are supposed to be synonymous: love of nature and love of primitive humans. We seem to have only two options. One is to say that native North Americans went too far — of course they weren’t nearly as bad as Europeans, but we need to return to even lower levels of population and domestication. I respect this position morally, but strategically it’s absurd. How can the future inhabitants of North America be held at a level that the original inhabitants abandoned at least a thousand years ago?

The other option is to say that native North Americans did not go too far. The subtext is usually something like this: “Moralistic ecologists think it’s wrong that my society holds nature down and milks it for its own benefit, but if the Native Americans did it, it must be OK!” This conclusion is nearly universal in popular writing. Plenty of respectable authors would never be caught idealizing simple foragers, but when they find out these “primitives” hunted competitors like neolithic Microsofts and cleared forests to plant grain, out comes the “wise Indian” card.

There is a third option, but it requires abandoning the whole civilized-primitive framework. Suppose we say, “We can regrow the spectacular fecundity that North America had in the 1700′s, not as a temporary stage between the fall of one Earth-monopolizing society and the rise of another, but as a permanent condition — and we will protect this condition not by duplicating any way our ancestors lived, but by inventing new ways. We can do this because human nature continues to evolve. Just as the old model of civilization became available to us as we changed, we are changing again and new doors are opening.

Well, they’re only open a crack. To grow biological abundance for its own sake, and not for human utility, is still a fringe position. But my point is that the civilized-primitive framework forces us to divide things a certain way: On one side are complexity, change, invention, unstable “growth”, taking, control, and the future. On the other side are simplicity, stasis, tradition, stability, giving, freedom, and the past. Once we abandon that framework, which is itself an artifact of western industrial society, we can integrate evidence that the framework excludes, and we can try to match things up differently.

The combination that I’m suggesting is: complexity, change, invention, stability, giving, freedom, and both the past and the future. This isn’t the only combination that could be suggested, and I doubt it’s the easiest to put into practice, but it’s surprisingly noncontroversial. Al Gore would probably agree with every point. The catch is that Gore is playing to a public consciousness in which “freedom” means a nice paint job on control, and in which no one has any idea what’s really necessary for stability.

Americans think freedom means no restraint. So I’m free to start a big company and rule ten thousand wage laborers, and if they don’t like it they’re free to go on strike, and I’m free to hire thugs to crack their heads, and they’re free to quit, and I’m free to buy politicans to cut off support for the unemployed, so now they’re free to either starve and die, or accept the job on my terms and use their freedom of speech to impotently complain.

A better definition of freedom is no coercion. I define “restraint” as preventing someone from doing something, and “coercion” as forcing someone to do something, usually by punishing them for not doing it. Primitive societies tend to be very good at avoiding coercion. In The Continuum Concept, Jean Liedloff writes that among the Yequana, it is forbidden to even ask another person to do something. It seems strange to us, but to have a society where no one is forced to do what they don’t want to do, you actually need a lot of restraints.

So there’s one place where we can learn more from looking backward than looking forward. But there is more than one way for coercion to appear — it’s like a disease with multiple vectors. Primitive cultures have extraordinary resistance to the way coercion must have appeared over and over in their history — among a group of people who all know each other, an arrogant charismatic leader arises. But they have little or no resistance to another way it’s been appearing more and more often over the last few thousand years: as a hidden partner with seductive new physical and social tools.

To understand what’s necessary for both freedom and stability, we need to go deep into a close ally of the critique of civilization: the critique of technology. Now, as soon as you say you’re against technology, some nit-picker points out that even a stone axe is a technology. We know what we mean, but we have trouble putting it into words. Our first instinct is to try to draw a line, and say that technologies on one side are bad, and on the other side are good. And at this point, primitivism comes into the picture as a convenience.

It reminds me of the debate over abortion, which is ultimately about drawing a line between when the potential child is part of the mother’s body, and when it’s a separate person with full rights. Drawing the line at the first breath would make the most sense on biblical grounds, but no one wants to do that, and almost no one wants to draw it at passage through the birth canal. But if you go farther back than that, you get an unbroken grey area all the way to conception! Fundamentalists love to draw the line at conception, not only because it gives them more control over women, but because they hate grey areas.

In the same way, primitivism enters the debate over good technology with a sharply drawn line a long way back. We don’t have to wrestle with how to manufacture bicycles without exploitation, or how to make cities sustainable, or what uses are appropriate for water wheels, or how to avoid the atrocities of ancient empires, if we just draw the line between settled grain farmers and nomadic forager-hunters.

To be fair to primitivists, they still have to wrestle with the grey areas from foraging to horticulture to agriculture, and from camps to villages to towns, and with arguments that we should go back even farther. The real fundamentalists on this issue are the techno-utopians. They say “technology is neutral,” which really means “Thou shalt not ascribe built-in negative effects to any technology,” but of course they ascribe built-in positive effects to technologies all the time. So it ends up being not a statement of fact but a command to action: “Any technology you can think of, do it!” This is like solving the abortion debate by legalizing murder.

We must apply intelligent selection to technology, but we aren’t really worried that the neighboring village will reinvent metalworking and massacre our children with swords. We just want bulldozers to stop turning grassy fields into dreadful suburbs, and we want urban spaces to be made for people not cars, and we want to turn off the TV, and take down the surveillance cameras, and do meaningful work instead of sitting in windowless office dungeons rearranging abstractions to pay off loans incurred getting our spirits broken.

We like ice cream and hot baths and sailing ships and recorded music and the internet, but we worry that we can’t have them without exterminating half the species on Earth, or exploiting Asian sweatshop workers, or dumping so many toxins that we all get cancer, or overextending our system so far that it crashes and we get eaten by roving gangs.

But notice: primitive people don’t think this way! Of course, if you put them on an assembly line or on the side of a freeway or in a modern war, they would know they were in hell. But if you offered them an LED lantern made on an assembly line, or a truck ride to their hunting ground, or a gun, they would accept it without hesitation. Primitive people adopt any tool they find useful — not because they’re wise, but because they’re ignorant, because their cultures have not evolved defenses against tools that will lead them astray.

I think the root of civilization, and a major source of human evil, is simply that we became clever enough to extend our power beyond our empathy. It’s like the famous Twilight Zone episode where there’s a box with a button, and if you push it, you get a million dollars and someone you don’t know dies. We have countless “boxes” that do basically the same thing. Some of them are physical, like cruise missiles or ocean-killing fertilizers, or even junk food where your mouth gets a million dollars and your heart dies. Others are social, like subsidies that make junk food affordable, or the corporation, which by definition does any harm it can get away with that will bring profit to the shareholders. I’m guessing it all started when our mental and physical tools combined to enable positive feedback in personal wealth. Anyway, as soon as you have something that does more harm than good, but that appears to the decision makers to do more good than harm, the decision makers will decide to do more and more of it, and before long you have a whole society built around obvious benefits that do hidden harm.

The kicker is, once we gain from extending our power beyond our seeing and feeling, we have an incentive to repress our seeing and feeling. If child slaves are making your clothing, and you want to keep getting clothing, you either have to not know about them, or know about them and feel good about it. You have to make yourself ignorant or evil.

But gradually we’re learning. Every time it comes out that some product is made with sweatshop labor, a few people stop buying it. Every day, someone is in a supermarket deciding whether to spend extra money to buy shade-grown coffee or fair trade chocolate. It’s not making a big difference, but all mass changes have to start with a few people, and my point is that we are stretching the human conscience farther than it’s ever gone, making sacrifices to help forests we will never see and people we will never meet. This is not simple-minded or “idealistic,” but rational, highly sophisticated moral behavior. And you find it not at the trailing edge of civilization but at the leading edge, among educated urbanites.

There are also growing movements to reduce energy consumption, and to eat locally-produced food, and to give up high-paying jobs for better quality of life, and to trade industrial-scale for human-scale tools. I don’t own a car, but it’s not to save the world — it’s because the continuing costs of owning a car would force me into a different economic niche. I would be building dependencies on the impersonal world of money, and severing dependencies on friends and family. Maybe I would find myself putting ads on this website and dumbing down the content to get a larger audience.

On my land, I’ve decided not to use a chainsaw. I bought one but couldn’t bring myself to put fuel in it — once I take that step, I’ve committed part of my consciousness to caring for a machine that demands toxic substances I can’t make myself, and the only benefit would be that every time I cut wood, I could spend a few minutes breathing exhaust fumes and hearing deafening noise, instead of a few hours smelling fresh-cut cedar, listening to birds, and getting good exercise doing meaningful work.

When I look at the discourse around this kind of choice, it’s positively satanic. People whose position is basically “Thundersaw cut fast, me feel like god” present themselves as agents of enlightenment and progress, while people with intelligent reasons for doing something completely new — choosing weaker, slower tools when high-energy tools are available — are seen as lizard-brained throwbacks. What’s even more tragic is when they see themselves that way.

This movement is often called “voluntary simplicity,” but we should distinguish between technological simplicity and mental simplicity. Primitive people, even when they have complex cultures, use simple tools for a simple reason — those are the only tools they have. In so-called “civilization,” we’ve just been using more and more complex technologies for simple-minded reasons — they give us brute power and shallow pleasures. But as we learn to be more sophisticated in our thinking about technology, we will be able to use complex tools for complex reasons — or simple tools for complex reasons.

Primitivists, understandably, are impatient. They want us to go back to using simple tools and they don’t care why we do it. It’s like our whole species is an addict, and seductive advanced technologies are the drug, and primitivism is the urge to throw our whole supply of drugs in the garbage. Any experienced addict will tell you that doesn’t work. The next day you dig it out of the garbage or the next week you buy more.

Of course there are arguments that this will be impossible. The most common one goes like this: “For civilization, you need agriculture, and for agriculture, you need topsoil. But the topsoil is gone! Agriculture survives only by dumping synthetic fertilizers on dead soil, and those fertilizers depend on oil, and the easily extracted oil is also gone. If the industrial system crashes just a little, we’ll have no oil, no fertilizer, no agriculture, and therefore no choice but foraging and hunting.”

Agriculture, whether or not it’s a good idea, is in no danger. The movement to switch the whole planet to synthetic fertilizers on dead soil (ironically called “the Green Revolution”) had not even started yet when another movement started to switch back: organic farming. Present organic farmers are still using oil to run tractors and haul supplies in, but in terms of getting the soil to produce a crop, organic farming is agriculture without oil, and it’s the fastest growing segment of the food economy. It is being held back by cultural intertia, by the political power of industrial agribusiness, and by cheap oil. It is not being held back by any lack of land suitable for conversion to organic methods. No one says, “We bought this old farm, but since the soil is dead, we’re just going to leave it as a wasteland, and go hunt elk.” People find a way to bring the soil back.

The other common argument is that “humanity has learned its lesson.” I think this is on the right track, but too optimistic about how much we’ve learned, and about what kind of learning is necessary. Mere rebellion is as old as the first slave revolt in Ur, and you can find intellectual critiques of civilization in the Old Testament: From Ecclesiastes 5:11, “When goods increase, they are increased that eat them: and what good is there to the owners thereof?” And from Isaiah 5:8, “Woe unto those who join house to house, and field to field, until there is no place.” If this level of learning were enough, we would have found utopia thousands of years ago. Instead, people whose understanding was roughly the same as ours, and whose courage was greater, kept making the same mistakes.

In Against His-story, Against Leviathan, Fredy Perlman set out to document the whole history of resistance to civilization, and inadvertently undermined his conclusion, that this Leviathan will be the last, by showing again and again that resistance movements become the new dominators. The ancient Persian empire started when Cyrus was inspired by Zoroastrianism to sweep away the machinery of previous empires. The Roman empire started as a people’s movement to eradicate the Etruscans. The modern nation-state began with the Moravians forming a defensive alliance against the Franks, who fell into warlike habits themselves after centuries of resisting the Romans. And we all know what happened with Christianity.

I fear it’s going to happen again. Now, the simple desire to go primitive is harmless and beneficial — I wish luck and success to anyone who tries it, and I hope we always have some tribal forager-hunters around, just to keep the human potential stretched. And I enjoy occasional minor disasters like blackouts and snowstorms, which serve to strip away illusions and remind people that they’re alive. I loved the idea in Fight Club (the movie) of destroying the bank records to equalize wealth. That’s right in line with the ancient Jubilee tradition, where debts were canceled every few decades to restabilize the economy and prevent a hard collapse.

What I fear is that some writers are trying to inspire a movement to actively cause a hard collapse, and if they attract enough of the most dangerous kind of person, ideologues without intelligence, they could succeed. This would be a terrible mistake — not just a moral mistake but a strategic mistake — and the root of it is old-fashioned authoritarian thinking: that if you force someone to do something, it’s the same as if they do it on their own. In fact it’s exactly the opposite. The more we are forced to abandon this system, the less we will learn, and the more aggressively we will fight to rebuild something like it. And the more we choose to abandon it, the more we will learn, and the less likely we will make the same mistakes.

The really frightening thing is when people fantasize about destroying libraries and museums, as if this would prevent a complex society from ever getting started again — just like thousands of years ago, without libraries or museums, people didn’t start complex societies about fifty fucking times. In the addiction metaphor, burning libraries is like not only throwing the drugs away, but also erasing all memory of being an addict, and then going back to the same tempting environment with the same addictive personality. It’s such a perfect mistake that I can only conclude that these people subconsciously want to repeat the whole cycle of pain.

Of course we will not have another society based on oil, and per-capita energy consumption will drop, but it’s unlikely that energy or complexity will fall to preindustrial levels. Hydroelectric and atomic fission plants are in no immediate danger, hot fusion has been solved (video link), and every year there are new innovations in energy from sun, wind, waves, and ethanol crops. Alternative energy would be growing much faster with good funding, and in any case it’s not necessary to convert the whole global infrastructure in the next twenty years. Even in a general collapse, if just one region has a surplus of sustainable energy, they can use it to colonize and re-”develop” the collapsed areas at their own pace. Probably this will be happening all over.

I don’t think there’s any escape from complex high-energy societies, so instead of focusing on avoiding them, we should focus on making them tolerable. This means, first, that our system is enjoyable for its participants — that the activities necessary to keep it going are experienced by the people who do them as meaningful and freely chosen. Second, our system must be ethical toward the world around it. My standards here are high — the totality of biological life on Earth must be better off with us than without us. And third, our system must not be inherently unstable. It might be destroyed by an asteroid or an ice age, but it must not destabilize itself internally, by having an economy that has to grow or die, or by depleting nonrenewable resources, or by having any trend at all that ratchets, that easily goes one way but can’t go the other way without a catastrophe.

These three standards seem to be separate. When Orwell wrote that the future is “a boot stamping on a human face — forever,” he was imagining a system that’s internally stable but not enjoyable. Techno-utopians fantasize about a system that expands into space and lasts billions of years while crushing any trace of biological wildness. And some paranoids fear “ecofascism,” a system that is stable and serves nature, but that represses most humans.

I think all these visions are impossible, for a reason that is overlooked in our machine-worshipping culture: that collapse often happens for psychological reasons. Erich Fromm said it best, in “What Does It Mean to Be Human?”

Even if the social order can do everything to man — starve him, torture him, imprison him, or over feed him — this cannot be done without certain consequences which follow from the very conditions of human existence. Man, if utterly deprived of all stimuli and pleasure, will be incapable of performing work, certainly any skilled work. If he is not that utterly destitute, he will tend to rebel if you make him a slave; he will tend to be violent if life is too boring; he will tend to lose all creativity if you make him into a machine. Man in this respect is not different from animals or from inanimate matter. You can get certain animals into the zoo, but they will not reproduce, and others will become violent although they are not violent in freedom… If man were infinitely malleable, there would have been no revolutions.
In 1491, Mann writes that on Pizarro’s march to conquer the Incas, he was actively helped by local populations who were sick of the empire’s oppression. Fredy Perlman’s book goes through the whole history of western civilization arguing for the human dissatisfaction factor in every failed society. And it’s clear to me and many other Americans that our empire is falling because nobody believes in it — not the troops in Iraq, who quickly learn that the war is bullshit, not the corporate executives, who at best are focused on short term profits and at worst are just thieves, not the politicians, who are cynically violating every supposed American principle for lobbyist money, and not the people who actually do the work, most of whom are just going through the motions.

Also, America (with other nations close behind) is getting more and more tightly controlled, and thus more unbearable for its participants. This is a general problem of top-down systems: for both technical and psychological reasons, it’s easy to add control mechanisms and hard to remove them, easy to squeeze tighter and hard to let go. As the controllers get more selfish and insulated, and the controlled get more frustrated and depressed, and more energy is wasted on forcing people to do what they wouldn’t do without force, the whole system seizes up, and can only be renewed by a surge of transforming energy from below. This transformation could be peaceful, but often the ruling interests block it until it builds up such pressure that it explodes violently.

The same way the ruling interests become corrupt through an exploitative relationship with the people, we all become corrupt when we participate in a society that exploits the life around it. When we talk about “nature,” we don’t mean wheat fields or zoo animals — we mean plants that scatter seeds to the wind and animals that roam at will. We mean freedom, raw aliveness, and we can’t repress it outside ourselves without also repressing it inside ourselves. The spirit that guides our shoe when it crushes grass coming through cracks in the driveway, also guides us to crush feelings and perceptions coming through cracks in our paved minds, and we need these feelings and perceptions to make good decisions, to be sane.

If primitive life seems better to us, it’s because it’s easier for smaller and simpler societies to avoid falling into domination. In the best tribes, the “chief” just tells people to do what they want to do anyway, and a good chief will channel this energy into a harmonious whole. But the bigger a system gets, and the longer a big system lasts, the more challenging it is to maintain a bottom-up energy structure.

I have a wild speculation about the origin of complex societies. The Great Pyramid of Giza is superior in every way to the two pyramids next to it — yet the Great Pyramid was the first of the three to be built. It’s like Egyptian civilization appeared out of nowhere at full strength, and immediately began declining. My speculation is: the first pyramid was not built by slaves! It was built by an explosion of human enthusiasm channeled into a massive cooperative effort. But then, as we’ve seen in pretty much every large system in history, this pattern of human action hardened, leaders became rulers, inspired actions became chores, and workers became slaves.

To achieve stability, and freedom, and ecological responsibility, we must learn to halt the slide from life into control, to maintain the bottom-up energy structure permanently, even in large complex systems. I don’t know how we’re going to do this. It’s even hard for individuals to do it — look at all the creative people who make one masterpiece and spend the rest of their life making crappy derivative works. The best plan I can think of is to build our system out of cells of less than 150 people, roughly the number at which cooperation tends to give way to hierarchy, and even then to expect cells to go bad, and have built-in pathways for dead cells to be broken down and new ones to form and individuals to move from cell to cell. Basically, we’d be making a big system that’s like a living body, where all past big systems have been animated corpses.

Assuming that our descendants do achieve stability, what technological level will they be at? I want to leave this one wide open. It’s possible in theory for us to go even farther “back” than the stone age. I call this the Land Dolphins scenario — that we evolve into super-intelligent creatures who don’t use any physical tools at all. At the other extreme, I’m not ruling out space colonies, although the worst mistake we could make would be expanding into space before we have learned stability on our home planet. I think physical travel to other solar systems is out of the question — long before mechanistic science gets that far, we will have moved to new paradigms that offer much easier ways to get to new worlds.

The “singluarity” theory is also off the mark. Techies think machines will surpass humans, because the mechanistic model tells them that we’re nothing but machines ourselves, so all we need to do is make better machines, which according to the myth of “progress” is inevitable. I think if we do get a technological transcendence, it’s going to involve machines changing humans. My favorite scenario is time-contracted virtual reality: suppose you can go into an artificial world, have the experience of spending a week there, and come back and only a day has passed, or an hour, or a minute. If we can do that, all bets are off!

The biggest weakness in my vision is that innovation can go with stability, that we can continue exploring and trying new things without repeatedly destabilizing ourselves by extending our power beyond our understanding. But it’s equally implausible that we could somehow transform ourselves out of being a curious and inventive species, or that we could drive ourselves to extinction — we are by far the most mentally adaptable species on Earth, and not bad at physical adaptation.

One possibility is that we will diverge into multiple species. It happens all the time in nature, and for most of the history of hominids there were several kinds of us walking around. This could happen through biotech, or through ordinary evolution, which we still don’t understand. Scientists have spent decades bombarding fruit flies with radiation, trying to produce a random mutation that would lead to a new species, and totally failed. But in another experiment, fruit flies were put through a maze with different exits depending on environmental preferences, and they formed distinct populations that refused to interbreed. It’s a good guess that this is already happening with humans, and that our accelerating evolution is being driven not by our high population, but by increasing diversity of human environments, which is likely to continue. Maybe we will spin off subspecies that overspecialize themselves into extinction, while a few generalist core species survive.

If I had to guess, we’re just going to keep making mistakes and falling down forever, and in that case the best we can do is minimize the severity of the falls. I think we’re doing a pretty good job even in the present collapse, which is shaping up to be a big one. Innovations in efficient farming and water filtration and small-scale alternative energy are going to give many regions a soft landing. Even in America, which has a long way to fall, we might escape with no more than a severe depression, a mild fall in population, and a much-needed shakeout of technology and economics. Life will get more painful but also more meaningful, as billions of human-hours shift from processing paperwork and watching TV to intensive learning of new skills to keep ourselves alive. These skills will run the whole range, from tracking deer to growing tomatoes to fixing bicycles to building solar-powered wi-fi networks — to new things we won’t even imagine until we have our backs to the wall.

I think we can see the future in popular fiction, but not the fiction we think. Most science fiction is either stuck in the recent past, in the industrial age’s boundless optimism about machines, or it looks at the present by exploring the unintended consequences of high tech. Cyberpunk is better — if you put a 1950′s Disney version of the year 2000 through a cyberpunk filter, you would get very close to the real 2000. The key insight of cyberpunk is that more technology doesn’t make things cleaner — it makes things dirtier.

Fantasy, while seeming to look at the past, might be seeing the future: elves and wizards could represent the increasing diversity of humans (or post-humans) after the breakdown of the industrial monoculture, and “magic” is clearly a glimpse of post-mechanistic scientific paradigms. And I think steampunk does the best of all, if you factor out the Victorian element. Like cyberpunk, it shows a human-made world that’s as messy and alive as nature, but the technological system is a crazy hybrid of everything from “stone age” to “space age” — thus refuting the very idea that we are locked into ages.

Primitive people see time as a circle. Civilized people see it as a line. We are about to see it as an open plain where we can wander at will. History is broken. Go!

No one should ever work.

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.

That doesn’t mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child’s play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn’t passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act. Oblomovism and Stakhanovism are two sides of the same debased coin.

The ludic life is totally incompatible with existing reality. So much the worse for “reality,” the gravity hole that sucks the vitality from the little in life that still distinguishes it from mere survival. Curiously — or maybe not — all the old ideologies are conservative because they believe in work. Some of them, like Marxism and most brands of anarchism, believe in work all the more fiercely because they believe in so little else.

Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx’s wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists — except that I’m not kidding — I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work — and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs — they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They’ll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don’t care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working.

You may be wondering if I’m joking or serious. I’m joking and serious. To be ludic is not to be ludicrous. Play doesn’t have to be frivolous, although frivolity isn’t triviality: very often we ought to take frivolity seriously. I’d like life to be a game — but a game with high stakes. I want to play for keeps.

The alternative to work isn’t just idleness. To be ludic is not to be quaaludic. As much as I treasure the pleasure of torpor, it’s never more rewarding than when it punctuates other pleasures and pastimes. Nor am I promoting the managed time-disciplined safety-valve called “leisure”; far from it. Leisure is nonwork for the sake of work. Leisure is the time spent recovering from work and in the frenzied but hopeless attempt to forget about work. Many people return from vacation so beat that they look forward to returning to work so they can rest up. The main difference between work and leisure is that work at least you get paid for your alienation and enervation.

I am not playing definitional games with anybody. When I say I want to abolish work, I mean just what I say, but I want to say what I mean by defining my terms in non-idiosyncratic ways. My minimum definition of work is forced labor, that is, compulsory production. Both elements are essential. Work is production enforced by economic or political means, by the carrot or the stick. (The carrot is just the stick by other means.) But not all creation is work. Work is never done for its own sake, it’s done on account of some product or output that the worker (or, more often, somebody else) gets out of it. This is what work necessarily is. To define it is to despise it. But work is usually even worse than its definition decrees. The dynamic of domination intrinsic to work tends over time toward elaboration. In advanced work-riddled societies, including all industrial societies whether capitalist of “Communist,” work invariably acquires other attributes which accentuate its obnoxiousness.

Usually — and this is even more true in “Communist” than capitalist countries, where the state is almost the only employer and everyone is an employee — work is employment, i. e., wage-labor, which means selling yourself on the installment plan. Thus 95% of Americans who work, work for somebody (or something) else. In the USSR or Cuba or Yugoslavia or any other alternative model which might be adduced, the corresponding figure approaches 100%. Only the embattled Third World peasant bastions — Mexico, India, Brazil, Turkey — temporarily shelter significant concentrations of agriculturists who perpetuate the traditional arrangement of most laborers in the last several millenia, the payment of taxes (= ransom) to the state or rent to parasitic landlords in return for being otherwise left alone. Even this raw deal is beginning to look good. All industrial (and office) workers are employees and under the sort of surveillance which ensures servility.

But modern work has worse implications. People don’t just work, they have “jobs.” One person does one productive task all the time on an or-else basis. Even if the task has a quantum of intrinsic interest (as increasingly many jobs don’t) the monotony of its obligatory exclusivity drains its ludic potential. A “job” that might engage the energies of some people, for a reasonably limited time, for the fun of it, is just a burden on those who have to do it for forty hours a week with no say in how it should be done, for the profit of owners who contribute nothing to the project, and with no opportunity for sharing tasks or spreading the work among those who actually have to do it. This is the real world of work: a world of bureaucratic blundering, of sexual harassment and discrimination, of bonehead bosses exploiting and scapegoating their subordinates who — by any rational-technical criteria — should be calling the shots. But capitalism in the real world subordinates the rational maximization of productivity and profit to the exigencies of organizational control.

The degradation which most workers experience on the job is the sum of assorted indignities which can be denominated as “discipline.” Foucault has complexified this phenomenon but it is simple enough. Discipline consists of the totality of totalitarian controls at the workplace — surveillance, rotework, imposed work tempos, production quotas, punching -in and -out, etc. Discipline is what the factory and the office and the store share with the prison and the school and the mental hospital. It is something historically original and horrible. It was beyond the capacities of such demonic dictators of yore as Nero and Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible. For all their bad intentions they just didn’t have the machinery to control their subjects as thoroughly as modern despots do. Discipline is the distinctively diabolical modern mode of control, it is an innovative intrusion which must be interdicted at the earliest opportunity.

Such is “work.” Play is just the opposite. Play is always voluntary. What might otherwise be play is work if it’s forced. This is axiomatic. Bernie de Koven has defined play as the “suspension of consequences.” This is unacceptable if it implies that play is inconsequential. The point is not that play is without consequences. This is to demean play. The point is that the consequences, if any, are gratuitous. Playing and giving are closely related, they are the behavioral and transactional facets of the same impulse, the play-instinct. They share an aristocratic disdain for results. The player gets something out of playing; that’s why he plays. But the core reward is the experience of the activity itself (whatever it is). Some otherwise attentive students of play, like Johan Huizinga (Homo Ludens), define it as game-playing or following rules. I respect Huizinga’s erudition but emphatically reject his constraints. There are many good games (chess, baseball, Monopoly, bridge) which are rule-governed but there is much more to play than game-playing. Conversation, sex, dancing, travel — these practices aren’t rule-governed but they are surely play if anything is. And rules can be played with at least as readily as anything else.

Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren’t free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or-else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent and disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing.

And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modern workplace. The liberals and conservatives and libertarians who lament totalitarianism are phonies and hypocrites. There is more freedom in any moderately deStalinized dictatorship than there is in the ordinary American workplace. You find the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as you do in a prison or monastery. In fact, as Foucault and others have shown, prisons and factories came in at about the same time, and their operators consciously borrowed from each other’s control techniques. A worker is a part time slave. The boss says when to show up, when to leave, and what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much work to do and how fast. He is free to carry his control to humiliating extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or how often you go to the bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any reason, or no reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors, he amasses a dossier on every employee. Talking back is called “insubordination,” just as if a worker is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it disqualifies you for unemployment compensation. Without necessarily endorsing it for them either, it is noteworthy that children at home and in school receive much the same treatment, justified in their case by their supposed immaturity. What does this say about their parents and teachers who work?

The demeaning system of domination I’ve described rules over half the waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men for decades, for most of their lifespans. For certain purposes it’s not too misleading to call our system democracy or capitalism or — better still — industrialism, but its real names are factory fascism and office oligarchy. Anybody who says these people are “free” is lying or stupid. You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are you’ll end up boring, stupid and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education. People who are regimented all their lives, handed off to work from school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home at the end, are habituated to heirarchy and psychologically enslaved. Their aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied that their fear of freedom is among their few rationally grounded phobias. Their obedience training at work carries over into the families they start, thus reproducing the system in more ways than one, and into politics, culture and everything else. Once you drain the vitality from people at work, they’ll likely submit to heirarchy and expertise in everything. They’re used to it.

We are so close to the world of work that we can’t see what it does to us. We have to rely on outside observers from other times or other cultures to appreciate the extremity and the pathology of our present position. There was a time in our own past when the “work ethic” would have been incomprehensible, and perhaps Weber was on to something when he tied its appearance to a religion, Calvinism, which if it emerged today instead of four centuries ago would immediately and appropriately be labeled a cult. Be that as it may, we have only to draw upon the wisdom of antiquity to put work in perspective. The ancients saw work for what it is, and their view prevailed, the Calvinist cranks notwithstanding, until overthrown by industrialism — but not before receiving the endorsement of its prophets.

Let’s pretend for a moment that work doesn’t turn people into stultified submissives. Let’s pretend, in defiance of any plausible psychology and the ideology of its boosters, that it has no effect on the formation of character. And let’s pretend that work isn’t as boring and tiring and humiliating as we all know it really is. Even then, work would still make a mockery of all humanistic and democratic aspirations, just because it usurps so much of our time. Socrates said that manual laborers make bad friends and bad citizens because they have no time to fulfill the responsibilities of friendship and citizenship. He was right. Because of work, no matter what we do we keep looking at our watches. The only thing “free” about so-called free time is that it doesn’t cost the boss anything. Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work. Free time is a euphemism for the peculiar way labor as a factor of production not only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace but assumes primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair. Coal and steel don’t do that. Lathes and typewriters don’t do that. But workers do. No wonder Edward G. Robinson in one of his gangster movies exclaimed, “Work is for saps!”

Both Plato and Xenophon attribute to Socrates and obviously share with him an awareness of the destructive effects of work on the worker as a citizen and a human being. Herodotus identified contempt for work as an attribute of the classical Greeks at the zenith of their culture. To take only one Roman example, Cicero said that “whoever gives his labor for money sells himself and puts himself in the rank of slaves.” His candor is now rare, but contemporary primitive societies which we are wont to look down upon have provided spokesmen who have enlightened Western anthropologists. The Kapauku of West Irian, according to Posposil, have a conception of balance in life and accordingly work only every other day, the day of rest designed “to regain the lost power and health.” Our ancestors, even as late as the eighteenth century when they were far along the path to our present predicament, at least were aware of what we have forgotten, the underside of industrialization. Their religious devotion to “St. Monday” — thus establishing a de facto five-day week 150-200 years before its legal consecration — was the despair of the earliest factory owners. They took a long time in submitting to the tyranny of the bell, predecessor of the time clock. In fact it was necessary for a generation or two to replace adult males with women accustomed to obedience and children who could be molded to fit industrial needs. Even the exploited peasants of the ancient regime wrested substantial time back from their landlord’s work. According to Lafargue, a fourth of the French peasants’ calendar was devoted to Sundays and holidays, and Chayanov’s figures from villages in Czarist Russia — hardly a progressive society — likewise show a fourth or fifth of peasants’ days devoted to repose. Controlling for productivity, we are obviously far behind these backward societies. The exploited muzhiks would wonder why any of us are working at all. So should we.

To grasp the full enormity of our deterioration, however, consider the earliest condition of humanity, without government or property, when we wandered as hunter-gatherers. Hobbes surmised that life was then nasty, brutish and short. Others assume that life was a desperate unremitting struggle for subsistence, a war waged against a harsh Nature with death and disaster awaiting the unlucky or anyone who was unequal to the challenge of the struggle for existence. Actually, that was all a projection of fears for the collapse of government authority over communities unaccustomed to doing without it, like the England of Hobbes during the Civil War. Hobbes’ compatriots had already encountered alternative forms of society which illustrated other ways of life — in North America, particularly — but already these were too remote from their experience to be understandable. (The lower orders, closer to the condition of the Indians, understood it better and often found it attractive. Throughout the seventeenth century, English settlers defected to Indian tribes or, captured in war, refused to return. But the Indians no more defected to white settlements than Germans climb the Berlin Wall from the west.) The “survival of the fittest” version — the Thomas Huxley version — of Darwinism was a better account of economic conditions in Victorian England than it was of natural selection, as the anarchist Kropotkin showed in his book Mutual Aid, A Factor of Evolution. (Kropotkin was a scientist — a geographer — who’d had ample involuntary opportunity for fieldwork whilst exiled in Siberia: he knew what he was talking about.) Like most social and political theory, the story Hobbes and his successors told was really unacknowledged autobiography.

The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, surveying the data on contemporary hunter-gatherers, exploded the Hobbesian myth in an article entitled “The Original Affluent Society.” They work a lot less than we do, and their work is hard to distinguish from what we regard as play. Sahlins concluded that “hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society.” They worked an average of four hours a day, assuming they were “working” at all. Their “labor,” as it appears to us, was skilled labor which exercised their physical and intellectual capacities; unskilled labor on any large scale, as Sahlins says, is impossible except under industrialism. Thus it satisfied Friedrich Schiller’s definition of play, the only occasion on which man realizes his complete humanity by giving full “play” to both sides of his twofold nature, thinking and feeling. As he put it: “The animal works when deprivation is the mainspring of its activity, and it plays when the fullness of its strength is this mainspring, when superabundant life is its own stimulus to activity.” (A modern version — dubiously developmental — is Abraham Maslow’s counterposition of “deficiency” and “growth” motivation.) Play and freedom are, as regards production, coextensive. Even Marx, who belongs (for all his good intentions) in the productivist pantheon, observed that “the realm of freedom does not commence until the point is passed where labor under the compulsion of necessity and external utility is required.” He never could quite bring himself to identify this happy circumstance as what it is, the abolition of work — it’s rather anomalous, after all, to be pro-worker and anti-work — but we can.

The aspiration to go backwards or forwards to a life without work is evident in every serious social or cultural history of pre-industrial Europe, among them M. Dorothy George’s England In Transition and Peter Burke’s Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. Also pertinent is Daniel Bell’s essay, “Work and its Discontents,” the first text, I believe, to refer to the “revolt against work” in so many words and, had it been understood, an important correction to the complacency ordinarily associated with the volume in which it was collected, The End of Ideology. Neither critics nor celebrants have noticed that Bell’s end-of-ideology thesis signaled not the end of social unrest but the beginning of a new, uncharted phase unconstrained and uninformed by ideology. It was Seymour Lipset (in Political Man), not Bell, who announced at the same time that “the fundamental problems of the Industrial Revolution have been solved,” only a few years before the post- or meta-industrial discontents of college students drove Lipset from UC Berkeley to the relative (and temporary) tranquility of Harvard.

As Bell notes, Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, for all his enthusiasm for the market and the division of labor, was more alert to (and more honest about) the seamy side of work than Ayn Rand or the Chicago economists or any of Smith’s modern epigones. As Smith observed: “The understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations… has no occasion to exert his understanding… He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.” Here, in a few blunt words, is my critique of work. Bell, writing in 1956, the Golden Age of Eisenhower imbecility and American self-satisfaction, identified the unorganized, unorganizable malaise of the 1970′s and since, the one no political tendency is able to harness, the one identified in HEW’s report Work in America, the one which cannot be exploited and so is ignored. That problem is the revolt against work. It does not figure in any text by any laissez-faire economist — Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, Richard Posner — because, in their terms, as they used to say on Star Trek, “it does not compute.”

If these objections, informed by the love of liberty, fail to persuade humanists of a utilitarian or even paternalist turn, there are others which they cannot disregard. Work is hazardous to your health, to borrow a book title. In fact, work is mass murder or genocide. Directly or indirectly, work will kill most of the people who read these words. Between 14,000 and 25,000 workers are killed annually in this country on the job. Over two million are disabled. Twenty to twenty-five million are injured every year. And these figures are based on a very conservative estimation of what constitutes a work-related injury. Thus they don’t count the half million cases of occupational disease every year. I looked at one medical textbook on occupational diseases which was 1,200 pages long. Even this barely scratches the surface. The available statistics count the obvious cases like the 100,000 miners who have black lung disease, of whom 4,000 die every year, a much higher fatality rate than for AIDS, for instance, which gets so much media attention. This reflects the unvoiced assumption that AIDS afflicts perverts who could control their depravity whereas coal-mining is a sacrosanct activity beyond question. What the statistics don’t show is that tens of millions of people have heir lifespans shortened by work — which is all that homicide means, after all. Consider the doctors who work themselves to death in their 50′s. Consider all the other workaholics.

Even if you aren’t killed or crippled while actually working, you very well might be while going to work, coming from work, looking for work, or trying to forget about work. The vast majority of victims of the automobile are either doing one of these work-obligatory activities or else fall afoul of those who do them. To this augmented body-count must be added the victims of auto-industrial pollution and work-induced alcoholism and drug addiction. Both cancer and heart disease are modern afflictions normally traceable, directly, or indirectly, to work.

Work, then, institutionalizes homicide as a way of life. People think the Cambodians were crazy for exterminating themselves, but are we any different? The Pol Pot regime at least had a vision, however blurred, of an egalitarian society. We kill people in the six-figure range (at least) in order to sell Big Macs and Cadillacs to the survivors. Our forty or fifty thousand annual highway fatalities are victims, not martyrs. They died for nothing — or rather, they died for work. But work is nothing to die for.

Bad news for liberals: regulatory tinkering is useless in this life-and-death context. The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration was designed to police the core part of the problem, workplace safety. Even before Reagan and the Supreme Court stifled it, OSHA was a farce. At previous and (by current standards) generous Carter-era funding levels, a workplace could expect a random visit from an OSHA inspector once every 46 years.

State control of the economy is no solution. Work is, if anything, more dangerous in the state-socialist countries than it is here. Thousands of Russian workers were killed or injured building the Moscow subway. Stories reverberate about covered-up Soviet nuclear disasters which make Times Beach and Three-Mile Island look like elementary-school air-raid drills. On the other hand, deregulation, currently fashionable, won’t help and will probably hurt. From a health and safety standpoint, among others, work was at its worst in the days when the economy most closely approximated laissez-faire.

Historians like Eugene Genovese have argued persuasively that — as antebellum slavery apologists insisted — factory wage-workers in the Northern American states and in Europe were worse off than Southern plantation slaves. No rearrangement of relations among bureaucrats and businessmen seems to make much difference at the point of production. Serious enforcement of even the rather vague standards enforceable in theory by OSHA would probably bring the economy to a standstill. The enforcers apparently appreciate this, since they don’t even try to crack down on most malefactors.

What I’ve said so far ought not to be controversial. Many workers are fed up with work. There are high and rising rates of absenteeism, turnover, employee theft and sabotage, wildcat strikes, and overall goldbricking on the job. There may be some movement toward a conscious and not just visceral rejection of work. And yet the prevalent feeling, universal among bosses and their agents and also widespread among workers themselves is that work itself is inevitable and necessary.

I disagree. It is now possible to abolish work and replace it, insofar as it serves useful purposes, with a multitude of new kinds of free activities. To abolish work requires going at it from two directions, quantitative and qualitative. On the one hand, on the quantitative side, we have to cut down massively on the amount of work being done. At present most work is useless or worse and we should simply get rid of it. On the other hand — and I think this is the crux of the matter and the revolutionary new departure — we have to take what useful work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like and craft-like pastimes, indistinguishable from other pleasurable pastimes, except that they happen to yield useful end-products. Surely that shouldn’t make them less enticing to do. Then all the artificial barriers of power and property could come down. Creation could become recreation. And we could all stop being afraid of each other.

I don’t suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn’t worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done — presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now — would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing, and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkeys and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes.

Forty percent of the workforce are white-collar workers, most of whom have some of the most tedious and idiotic jobs ever concocted. Entire industries, insurance and banking and real estate for instance, consist of nothing but useless paper-shuffling. It is no accident that the “tertiary sector,” the service sector, is growing while the “secondary sector” (industry) stagnates and the “primary sector” (agriculture) nearly disappears. Because work is unnecessary except to those whose power it secures, workers are shifted from relatively useful to relatively useless occupations as a measure to assure public order. Anything is better than nothing. That’s why you can’t go home just because you finish early. They want your time, enough of it to make you theirs, even if they have no use for most of it. Otherwise why hasn’t the average work week gone down by more than a few minutes in the past fifty years?

Next we can take a meat-cleaver to production work itself. No more war production, nuclear power, junk food, feminine hygiene deodorant — and above all, no more auto industry to speak of. An occasional Stanley Steamer or Model-T might be all right, but the auto-eroticism on which such pestholes as Detroit and Los Angeles depend on is out of the question. Already, without even trying, we’ve virtually solved the energy crisis, the environmental crisis and assorted other insoluble social problems.

Finally, we must do away with far and away the largest occupation, the one with the longest hours, the lowest pay and some of the most tedious tasks around. I refer to housewives doing housework and child-rearing. By abolishing wage-labor and achieving full unemployment we undermine the sexual division of labor. The nuclear family as we know it is an inevitable adaptation to the division of labor imposed by modern wage-work. Like it or not, as things have been for the last century or two it is economically rational for the man to bring home the bacon, for the woman to do the shitwork to provide him with a haven in a heartless world, and for the children to be marched off to youth concentration camps called “schools,” primarily to keep them out of Mom’s hair but still under control, but incidentally to acquire the habits of obedience and punctuality so necessary for workers. If you would be rid of patriarchy, get rid of the nuclear family whose unpaid “shadow work,” as Ivan Illich says, makes possible the work-system that makes it necessary. Bound up with this no-nukes strategy is the abolition of childhood and the closing of the schools. There are more full-time students than full-time workers in this country. We need children as teachers, not students. They have a lot to contribute to the ludic revolution because they’re better at playing than grown-ups are. Adults and children are not identical but they will become equal through interdependence. Only play can bridge the generation gap.

I haven’t as yet even mentioned the possibility of cutting way down on the little work that remains by automating and cybernizing it. All the scientists and engineers and technicians freed from bothering with war research and planned obsolescence would have a good time devising means to eliminate fatigue and tedium and danger from activities like mining. Undoubtedly they’ll find other projects to amuse themselves with. Perhaps they’ll set up world-wide all-inclusive multi-media communications systems or found space colonies. Perhaps. I myself am no gadget freak. I wouldn’t care to live in a pushbutton paradise. I don’t want robot slaves to do everything; I want to do things myself. There is, I think, a place for labor-saving technology, but a modest place. The historical and pre-historical record is not encouraging. When productive technology went from hunting-gathering to agriculture and on to industry, work increased while skills and self-determination diminished. The further evolution of industrialism has accentuated what Harry Braverman called the degradation of work. Intelligent observers have always been aware of this. John Stuart Mill wrote that all the labor-saving inventions ever devised haven’t saved a moment’s labor. Karl Marx wrote that “it would be possible to write a history of the inventions, made since 1830, for the sole purpose of supplying capital with weapons against the revolts of the working class.” The enthusiastic technophiles — Saint-Simon, Comte, Lenin, B. F. Skinner — have always been unabashed authoritarians also; which is to say, technocrats. We should be more than sceptical about the promises of the computer mystics. They work like dogs; chances are, if they have their way, so will the rest of us. But if they have any particularized contributions more readily subordinated to human purposes than the run of high tech, let’s give them a hearing.

What I really want to see is work turned into play. A first step is to discard the notions of a “job” and an “occupation.” Even activities that already have some ludic content lose most of it by being reduced to jobs which certain people, and only those people are forced to do to the exclusion of all else. Is it not odd that farm workers toil painfully in the fields while their air-conditioned masters go home every weekend and putter about in their gardens? Under a system of permanent revelry, we will witness the Golden Age of the dilettante which will put the Renaissance to shame. There won’t be any more jobs, just things to do and people to do them.

The secret of turning work into play, as Charles Fourier demonstrated, is to arrange useful activities to take advantage of whatever it is that various people at various times in fact enjoy doing. To make it possible for some people to do the things they could enjoy it will be enough just to eradicate the irrationalities and distortions which afflict these activities when they are reduced to work. I, for instance, would enjoy doing some (not too much) teaching, but I don’t want coerced students and I don’t care to suck up to pathetic pedants for tenure.

Second, there are some things that people like to do from time to time, but not for too long, and certainly not all the time. You might enjoy baby-sitting for a few hours in order to share the company of kids, but not as much as their parents do. The parents meanwhile, profoundly appreciate the time to themselves that you free up for them, although they’d get fretful if parted from their progeny for too long. These differences among individuals are what make a life of free play possible. The same principle applies to many other areas of activity, especially the primal ones. Thus many people enjoy cooking when they can practice it seriously at their leisure, but not when they’re just fueling up human bodies for work.

Third — other things being equal — some things that are unsatisfying if done by yourself or in unpleasant surroundings or at the orders of an overlord are enjoyable, at least for a while, if these circumstances are changed. This is probably true, to some extent, of all work. People deploy their otherwise wasted ingenuity to make a game of the least inviting drudge-jobs as best they can. Activities that appeal to some people don’t always appeal to all others, but everyone at least potentially has a variety of interests and an interest in variety. As the saying goes, “anything once.” Fourier was the master at speculating how aberrant and perverse penchants could be put to use in post-civilized society, what he called Harmony. He thought the Emperor Nero would have turned out all right if as a child he could have indulged his taste for bloodshed by working in a slaughterhouse. Small children who notoriously relish wallowing in filth could be organized in “Little Hordes” to clean toilets and empty the garbage, with medals awarded to the outstanding. I am not arguing for these precise examples but for the underlying principle, which I think makes perfect sense as one dimension of an overall revolutionary transformation. Bear in mind that we don’t have to take today’s work just as we find it and match it up with the proper people, some of whom would have to be perverse indeed. If technology has a role in all this it is less to automate work out of existence than to open up new realms for re/creation. To some extent we may want to return to handicrafts, which William Morris considered a probable and desirable upshot of communist revolution. Art would be taken back from the snobs and collectors, abolished as a specialized department catering to an elite audience, and its qualities of beauty and creation restored to integral life from which they were stolen by work. It’s a sobering thought that the grecian urns we write odes about and showcase in museums were used in their own time to store olive oil. I doubt our everyday artifacts will fare as well in the future, if there is one. The point is that there’s no such thing as progress in the world of work; if anything it’s just the opposite. We shouldn’t hesitate to pilfer the past for what it has to offer, the ancients lose nothing yet we are enriched.

The reinvention of daily life means marching off the edge of our maps. There is, it is true, more suggestive speculation than most people suspect. Besides Fourier and Morris — and even a hint, here and there, in Marx — there are the writings of Kropotkin, the syndicalists Pataud and Pouget, anarcho-communists old (Berkman) and new

(Bookchin). The Goodman brothers’ Communitas is exemplary for illustrating what forms follow from given functions (purposes), and there is something to be gleaned from the often hazy heralds of alternative/appropriate/intermediate/convivial technology, like Schumacher and especially Illich, once you disconnect their fog machines. The situationists — as represented by Vaneigem’s Revolution of Daily Life and in the Situationist International Anthology — are so ruthlessly lucid as to be exhilarating, even if they never did quite square the endorsement of the rule of the worker’s councils with the abolition of work. Better their incongruity, though than any extant version of leftism, whose devotees look to be the last champions of work, for if there were no work there would be no workers, and without workers, who would the left have to organize?

So the abolitionists would be largely on their own. No one can say what would result from unleashing the creative power stultified by work. Anything can happen. The tiresome debater’s problem of freedom vs. necessity, with its theological overtones, resolves itself practically once the production of use-values is coextensive with the consumption of delightful play-activity.

Life will become a game, or rather many games, but not — as it is now – — a zero/sum game. An optimal sexual encounter is the paradigm of productive play, The participants potentiate each other’s pleasures, nobody keeps score, and everybody wins. The more you give, the more you get. In the ludic life, the best of sex will diffuse into the better part of daily life. Generalized play leads to the libidinization of life. Sex, in turn, can become less urgent and desperate, more playful. If we play our cards right, we can all get more out of life than we put into it; but only if we play for keeps.

No one should ever work. Workers of the world… relax!

A couple weeks ago in Montreal, an old man fell on the subway tracks and a young woman jumped down and pulled him to safety seconds before the oncoming train would have killed him; the transit authority condemned the woman for violating the rule against going on the tracks. America’s military and intelligence agencies seem to have had advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks and let them happen, or at the very least they were guilty of spectacular incompetence; after the attacks, these institutions were not investigated, but made more secret and given greater powers. American airports began tedious and intrusive searches of ordinary flyers, confiscating harmless items like tweezers and nail files; but when testing of security systems continued to show that skilled people could get bombs and guns through, this testing was restricted.

Is this insane? Is it stupid? Incompetent? Irrational? Should we be shocked? Confused? No! It all makes perfect sense, and we shouldn’t be any more surprised than if we were on a battlefield and the other side shot at us. The system is quite sane, quite intelligent, and knows exactly what it’s doing. We are just stubbornly refusing to understand it.

“The system,” the global net of governments, corporations, technologies, beliefs and habits in which we are all more or less trapped, presents itself as a collaboration of decent and sensible people trying to do what’s best and not always succeeding. The system accepts mild dissenters who lamely complain that it’s run by idiots, or lazy people, or greedy people, making mistakes or doing crimes, and that if it weren’t for this “human nature” the whole setup would work fine.

The system does not accept the idea I’m suggesting here: That real human nature is extremely malleable and wants to be intelligent and good, but that it has been twisted into its present unnatural shape for sinister purposes. That greed and stupidity are more effects of our situation than causes of it. That powerful people who know each other and conspire in secret to get more powerful are only the surface of a deeper phenomenon. That what we think of as normal human society is, from its very foundation, an evil collective consciousness, a giant brain made up of people, like our brains are made of neurons that have no view of the action of the whole. And that it is evil because of its motive. What the system does, rationally, sanely, skillfully, predictably, relentlessly, is concentrate power: take power and awareness away from every living thing and give power to artificial central “authority,” and increase the strength, the perfection, the depth and breadth of central detached authority’s knowledge and control.

Why are we in a system that behaves this way? How did it get started? What is its deeper meaning, or what are its unseen relations? These are metaphysical questions with answers I can barely guess at. All I’m trying to do here is help people get out of indignant denial and calmly face the horrifying truth of the system in action.

Look back at the example I began with. The system doesn’t care if an old man dies. But if it can get people to put obedience to a rule ahead of their natural instinct to care for each other, even if it means allowing a horrible death, then it has won a great victory. Multiply this by a few million: War and genocide are not what we get when the system fails, but when it is most successful.

The system doesn’t care if airplanes crash and buildings collapse — in fact it wants airplanes to crash and buildings to collapse if that will get it what it really wants: for people to consent to degrading searches, to go along with ridiculous rules, to deny their inner strength and vision so they can respect and obey people with titles or uniforms, which mark them as the channels of still “higher” powers.

From the system’s perspective, the “zero tolerance” fad in schools is not to prevent violence, but to train people to follow rules even when they seem totally insane, to obediently suspend, expel, or arrest harmless kids for bread knives or chocolate guns.

The “war on drugs” is not to stop people from selling or using addictive substances, but, by criminalizing very common behaviors, to sort the population into the obedient and the disobedient, to put the disobedient in a lower class (prison laborers, convicted felons who can’t vote or get a good job), to make these two classes hate, fear, or resent each other, and to make the obedient be even more obedient out of fear of falling into the criminal class.

The medical system is not to heal or prevent sickness and injury, but to divert attention from the causes of sickness and injury, to suppress cheap effective treatments, to steer people into treatments that require more money and thus more obedience to the larger system, and in the best case, to get people to submit to extremely painful and expensive treatments that kill more often than they cure, just because it’s what they’re supposed to do.

The tax system is not to collect money for the government, but to get people to consent to give money to a central authority, and also to get them to fill their minds with a vast and complicated system of rules.

Environmental regulations are not to save the earth (which is still being steadily murdered) but to use the earth to make people support and obey regulations. Of course we need to stop cutting down forests and damming rivers, but the point is how the system channels this need to feed itself, getting millions of liberals to emotionally sympathize with unforgiving exercises of state violence against loggers and farmers.

If the system can feel excitement, it’s really excited about ecology, even more than about terrorism. The closer the earth gets to dying, the more people will go along with any draconian use of authority to save it. If the system can dream, maybe it dreams of a global green party ecocracy, where people are jailed for eating meat or not recycling. Of course, the earth will have to be prevented from recovering, kept constantly in crisis to keep people in furious fearful obedience.

There are non-authoritarian bottom-up ways to save the earth, to heal sickness, to get out of patterns of addiction and exploitation and violence. But the system will tell us that these ways are naive or irresponsible or dangerous, and it will try to head them off or overrun them by copying their goals or surface appearances onto its own structures, to keep those structures standing on top of us.

I’m thinking of the hippie and punk movements, where raw bursts of freedom were channeled into styles and frozen into status systems. I’m thinking of thisist or thatist intellectual movements, where wild thoughts are herded into theories and chained into abstruse books of ideas about ideas. I’m thinking of populist movements and near-revolutions, where people are fighting to be free of their rulers and owners, but are bought off with new rights and regulations, for which they are dependent on the system, and through which the system becomes just barely tolerable so it can keep going.

I’m even thinking of full-on revolutions, which disprove the common belief that our oppressors are simply “bad” elite people or “bad” varieties of central management. Many revolutions have killed the former rulers and toppled what passed for the system, and after every one a new corrupt elite and a new oppressive system fell into place.

Into place in what? Like seeing the bottom of a stream in the water patterns on top, we can see something deeper lurking beneath the patterns of history. What is it? Here’s another opening for occult thinking, but I’m going to stay with psychology: Authoritarian societal patterns come from authoritarian emotional patterns, from the habit of identifying with the controlling side in any conflict, pavement over weeds, police over outlaws, conquerors over natives, management over workers over slackers; from the habit of imagining “self” against “other” and defining your “self” as your bank balance and social status more than your feelings, your authority more than your friendships, your religion or country or local sports team more than your own body. These habits keep the system going through the most extreme revolutions, and the system keeps these habits going in every generation through parents and teachers quite rationally making kids compatible with the only world they know. We’re stuck in a horrible loop. How can we get out?

We get out one little step at a time, but first we have to understand “out,” and want to get out, and believe it’s possible. The system tells us that falling to the system is good: It’s good for a “failed” artist, with a small local audience, to become a “successful” artist whose works are duplicated for millions of strangers through industrial technology to enrich corporations. It’s good for a fringe idea, learned with excitement by free explorers, to become a dominant idea forcibly taught to bored inmates of schools. It’s good for an enhanced sense of right and wrong to become a new law, enforced by the threat of violent punishment by police and prisons. It’s good, as you get older, to own more expensive stuff requiring more reserved behavior, to adjust your tastes so you’re easier to bother and harder to satisfy.

Or, even when this path is not good, it’s supposed to be inevitable. A capitalist version of this doctrine is “What doesn’t grow dies.” But it’s not true! There are shops and pubs in Europe that have stayed tiny for centuries while proud corporations have bloated and collapsed. Increasing in scale and detachment and centralization and dominance is not the path of survival, but the path of prolonged suicide, and we don’t have to follow it.

It’s not quite that simple. We were all born and raised on a runaway train; we can’t get off and survive, and we can’t stop it from crashing. But a lot of us can survive the crash and learn why and how to stay off the next train. Our bad path has good paths within it.

There are people who stay radical their whole lives, or even get more and more outside the system. And there are strong competing systems everywhere that we don’t even recognize as systems because they’re non-authoritarian: gift economies invisible to the taking economy, networks of friends linked by empathy not exploitation, goal-less leader-less movements riding aliveness wherever it takes them, and the whole infinite system, which we patronize as “nature,” in which our exalted history is only a little aberration.

Does the forest have a king or a class of experts or a list of rules deciding which plant can grow where? No! They all work it out amongst themselves, and the result is a billion times more complex than our tinker-toy corporations and governments. It’s a vain projection for us to speak of “laws” of nature — I think nature has agreements and understandings. And our civilization is not killing the earth for human good or evolution, or out of greed or clumsiness or ignorance. It’s killing the earth out of jealousy, because it knows the earth has a better system. Wait and see.

Governments are wanting us to “peacefully demonstrate”, governments commonly have “government agents” posing as demonstrators which stir demonstrators into rioting, thus giving the government the excuse for mass arrests, confinements, announcing a police-state. Do we really want, as mothers to involve ourselves this way?

Listen to The Myth of the Innocent Civilian

The military on the streets of Iraq. How long before the same is seen on the streets of America and elsewhere?

The only way to stop all this is not to react as they want us to, with violence and hostility to both the State and each other. How many violent revolutions have led to just another tyranny, official or unofficial, to replace the one that fell? It has to be so because what is destroyed by violence will be replaced by the same energy. As I have said in my books, what you fight, you become.

John Lennon put it perfectly when he sang:

You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
You tell me that it’s evolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
But when you talk about destruction
Don’t you know that you can count me out …

… You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We’d all love to see the plan
You ask me for a contribution
Well, you know
We’re doing what we can
But when you want money
for people with minds that hate
All I can tell is brother you have to wait

Martin Luther King also put it brilliantly when he said of rioting:

‘The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis, but it must be followed by a sense of futility.’

Those are the words of a revolutionary who succeeded through peaceful non-cooperation. Yes, they killed him, but what he created through non-violence and determination went forth to end segregation. Physical life does not matter when compared with what is right, for we are all eternal Conciousness having an illusory experience and the greatest illusion is death.

I would much rather die ‘early’ doing what I knew to be right than to eek out a few more illusory years as a slave to a tyranny.

But there is no need even for that to bring an end to this nonsense. There are billions of people being enslaved and a comparative handful doing the enslaving. Er, I think I see a way out of this.

We need to come together in mutual support, love, kindness and empathy. We need to put aside the manufactured fault-lines that divide us – religion, politics, race, culture and income bracket. That is not to say people have to reject their beliefs, just don’t let them be weapons of division.

We are all in this together and we need to meet the challenge together, not steal from each other, loot or riot, or look the other way because something happening to someone else is ‘not my problem’. They are not seeking to enslave Muslims, Jews, black people, or white middle class Americans and so on. They are seeking to do it to all of us and they are picking off different groups one by one, just like the Nazis did in Germany. Remember these famous words because they are so applicable now:

First they came for the Jews and I was not a Jew so I did nothing.
Then they came for the communists and I was not a communist so I did nothing.
Then they came for the trade unionists and I was not a trade unionist so I did nothing.
Then they came for me and there was no-one left to speak out for me.

Let us unite behind that which affects everyone – the loss of our most basic freedoms. And if this is being planned now, what kind of world are our children and grandchildren going to live in? Can you live with that thought while doing nothing or rioting as the authorities want? I can’t.

We need to start getting organised in communities and groups to support each other and stop cooperating with the system – not to fight it. The system can only exist with our cooperation and acquiesce. We are holding it together. They have their men and women of violence, called the military and ‘Swat’ teams, to deal with violent resistance.

But their worst nightmare is our non-cooperation – the refusal to pay taxes; refusal to leave homes when banks foreclose on them; refusal to ‘comply’ with our own enslavement in any form. The system couldn’t cope if this was done on a mass scale. And that’s the point: to do this we need to do it en-masse and those not immediately affected need to support those who are.

Instead of compliance, we need the non-comply-dance of people who beat to a different drum and will not comply with what is unfair, unjust, or targets their freedom and the freedom of others. This approach does not refuse to comply in a spirit of hostility, rage or violence, but with love, joy and laughter – and an unbreakable determination not to cooperate with their own enslavement.

We need a mass refusal join the military, especially if they try to introduce the Draft; a refusal to do the compulsory ‘community service’ for young people that Obama’s controllers want to introduce (as does the UK government); and a refusal to join, or accept the legitimacy of, Obama’s planned civilian security force, which is nothing more than a scam to get the people to police the people on behalf of the Elite in the midst of the economic collapse and war.

We need to start getting together local currency schemes that can operate outside the system and, yes, people should also have mass protests if they choose, so long as they are peaceful. But they need to be part of the campaign of non-violent, non-cooperation, not the focus of it.

How many mass protests have there been over the years around the world and yet everything just goes on as before, be it war or globalisation. We need to stop posturing and then heading for the bar to feel good about ourselves and start doing what will actually make a difference.

Mass protests can ease frustration – steam whistles as I call them – but what good do most of them do? Mass non-cooperation with the system is far more effective.

The protests need to be targeted at non-cooperation, refusing to accept laws that ban assembly by massive numbers turning up; surrounding the homes of neighbours when the bank bailiffs come to put them on the street; and so filling the locations of government and finance with masses of people that the system cannot function. Workers who provide essential services to government, police and financial institutions etc., can refuse to do so until Orwellian laws and financial injustice are removed. In this way the perpetrators are affected, not the mass of the people, as with all-out strikes.

And all of this needs to be good humoured and strictly peaceful.

I would say this also to those in uniform. You may think you have power, but you are just pawns in the game like anyone else. You don’t have the power, your uniform does, because that is an extension of the State. Those inside are just there to animate the uniform and do the bidding of those it represents. When you are useful to the cabal they’ll praise you and when you are surplus to their requirements as part of the bigger agenda they’ll show you the door.

You have children and grandchildren, too, who will have to live in the world you are policing into existence by ‘following orders’ and believing the manipulative nonsense fed to you by governments and cabal ‘training’ fronts like the UK-based Common Purpose. Wake up from the trance and stop building a Police State for your own children and grandchildren – and everyone else. Think about the consequences for those you love of what you are doing – and stop doing it.

More than anything, we all need to free our minds and become conscious. From that, everything else will come, including the intuition, inspiration and knowing that will guide us on how most effectively to deal with what we face.

If there are many things you would like to do in a room, but the room is dark and you can’t see, what is the fundamental first step to anything else happening? You have to turn on the light and then all the rest becomes possible. Without that you are thrashing around in the dark and falling over the furniture.

That is what ‘humans’ are doing today and have been for so long. They have been manipulated to believe they are their bodies and their names when those are just the experiences of who they truly are – eternal Consciousness. As the great American comedian, Bill Hicks, said:

‘… all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There’s no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves.’

The divisions between us are illusory to allow a certain kind of experience, but these illusions have been exploited mercilessly to divide and rule us.

ENOUGH!

When we awaken to the truth of who we are the world looks very different and so do the challenges that are put before us – or we put before ourselves. Move your point of observation and everything changes. Try it. Try ceasing to identify who you are with your body, your name and the reflection in the mirror. Try seeing those things as experiences and not who you are. Try observing your life and the world from the perception of the real you – eternal Conciousness, All That Is, Has Been and Ever Can Be in our illusion called ‘time’.

Eternal Conscious in awareness of itself doesn’t riot; it is not violent and it doesn’t loot. But nor does it ever do, or accept for itself and others, what is not fair, just, loving and kind. Crucially, Consciousness is without fear. When we operate on that level then we can truly claim to be Conscious and not trapped in the illusion called Mind. As Albert Einstein said: ‘You cannot solve problems with the same level of consciousness that created them.’

John Lennon also made this key point in Revolution about what needs to happen to really make a difference. We need to free our minds and become Conscious:

You say you’ll change the constitution
Well, you know
We all want to change your head
You tell me it’s the institution
Well, you know
You better free you mind instead
But if you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao
You ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow

We are now fast heading for the eye of the storm that has been planned for so long to enslave the global population in a centralised tyranny. But we don’t have to accept it or acquiesce to it, meekly looking on as the walls of control close in by the day.
But that is what is happening and it has to stop. For everyone’s sake, it has to stop.
We can come together, we MUST come together, putting aside the fault-lines of race, religion, culture and income bracket. These are just illusory labels through which we are divided and therefore ruled. Believe in them if you wish, and enjoy them if they make you happy, but don’t let them divide us any longer.

We need to come together in mutual support at this time as those with sick minds and closed hearts are poised to throw everything at us to complete their agenda for total control. Whether their insanity prevails is not in their hands, but in ours. It is we who have the power if only we would choose to use it.

We are One Consciousness deluded into thinking we are ‘little me’. When we realise that we are all One – and act upon that with courage, love, kindness, peace and empathy for all who need support – the walls of oppression must fall.

But sitting on your arse hoping it will all go away is no longer an option.

It never was.