Showing posts with label Philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Philosophy. Show all posts

Friday 3 March 2023

How To Change Your Life For The Better


- Do things your future self will thank you for.

- Eat well. Get your calories in. Make sure your diet is balanced. Take supplements if you don't like vegetables. Have smoothies if you don't like fruit. Drink protein shakes between meals and before and after exercise.

- Brush your teeth twice a day.

- Drink plenty of water even if you're not thirsty.

- Make your bed every morning. How will you change the world if you can't make your bed?

- Keep your living space clean and tidy. Do it as you go, and it will become second nature.

- Be confident enough to be yourself. Embrace your body. If you can't embrace it because you feel ugly, then get in shape, for goodness' sake.

- Get in shape. Work out every day. You'll feel better and look better too.

- Don't be an asshole. 

- Be honest, even when the truth hurts. 

- Be polite. Manners cost nothing; if you're kind to people, you're more likely to get what you want.

- Be kind to everyone. You never know what demons people are fighting.

- Be humble. You never know when the wheel of fortune will turn.

- Say sorry when you're wrong. Change your mind when valid evidence supports it.

- Don't make decisions when you're angry. Let the emotion subside, and then make a decision based on facts. If there isn't time for that, go with your gut.

- Go with your gut. Listen to your inner voice.

- Don't be afraid to make mistakes, but never make the same mistake twice.

- Do what you love.

- Surround yourself with people you admire. It might rub off.

- Distance yourself from people that drain you and people you don't respect.

- Embrace every opportunity that comes your way.

- If you commit to something, do it with passion and do it well

- Don't put things off. Could you do it now?

- Don't pigeonhole yourself. You're never too old to learn.

- Look at the world with the energy and enthusiasm of a five-year-old.

- Don't worry what people think of you. If you're authentic, people will like you. Those that don't aren't worth worrying about

- Don't chase women. Instead, show them who you are, and the right one will chase you.

- Life is short. Make each day count. Walk through the cemetery to remind yourself of this.

- Enjoy the rain, but take a brolly.

- Dress for the weather.

- Wear things you love - express yourself.

- Get your living space exactly as you want it.

- Enjoy free things. Get out in nature. See something green daily, and find some water to look at every week.

- Walk at least 10,000 steps each day

- Heal old arguments. Forgive those who have wronged you. Be the bigger person. Life is too short.

- Focus on what you can control. Fuck everything else.

- Don't smoke. If you can't stop, get a vape pen, so you don't die of cancer.

- List your ailments, go to the doctor, and get them sorted.

- Be the best possible version of yourself.

- Don't rely on anyone else. Hope for the best in everyone, but expect the worst. Then, you'll always be satisfied.


Try this for thirty days, and let me know how it goes.

Thursday 23 February 2023

Forgiveness




Forgiveness


Forgiveness, a weighty task

For those who've wronged us in the past

But still we try, with hope in heart

To move beyond the pain and start


My parents, who split before my eyes

Left me with questions, without goodbyes

My father, distant, rarely near

A stranger to me, throughout the years


My children's mother, she took flight

Left me alone, in the dead of night

Accusations hurled, lies abound

My world shattered, my heart unbound


My family, they turned away

Disowned me, left me in dismay

And at school, just a young child

Pushed down, teased, left hurt inside.


My ex, who played a cruel game

Lied to me, with no sense of shame

In love with someone new, I learned

But falsely blamed, my fate was turned


The bullies who laughed at my legs

The one who smashed a bottle on my head

And those who broke my bones, so true

I forgive them all, what else can I do?


For in forgiveness, there is strength

It frees the soul, it takes the length

Of pain and anger, hurt and fear

And turns it into love, so clear


So I forgive, and I let go

Of all the pain, the hurt, the woe

For life is short, and time flies fast

And in forgiveness, we find peace at last.

Monday 20 February 2023

20 Life Lessons for the Brave and Bold

For my children




20 Life Lessons for the Brave and Bold


From J.K. Rowling's pen, I bring to you,
Twenty lessons that will help to see you through.
Nobody cares, but don't you despair,
Embrace who you are, and show that you care.

The more you give, the more you'll receive,
So set your sights high, and always believe.
No act of kindness is ever too small,
For the ocean of life embraces us all.

No work is beneath you, that's for sure,
So get your hands dirty, and keep your heart pure.
Start meditating, find peace in your mind,
And your thoughts and your actions will be more aligned.

Don't be afraid to take risks, to be bold,
For the timid and shy will never grow old.
Don't make decisions when notions run high,
Take time to consider; let your emotions subside.

Be patient and persistent, keep your head high,
And your spirit will soar, like the birds in the sky.
You don't need to impress everyone you meet,
Just be true to yourself, and your goals will be sweet.

Listen to learn and your mind will grow,
With knowledge and wisdom that will surely flow.
Enrich your thoughts, don't let them remain,
Stagnant and still, like a train without a lane.

Don't take the easy road, it's not worth the cost,
For the path that is challenging is where you'll find the most.
Start reading books, they're a treasure trove,
Of knowledge and wisdom, that will help you to grow.

Respect others as you would respect yourself,
And your life will be filled with joy and with wealth.
Narrow down your focus bit by bit,
And your goals will be clear, you'll have a plan, you'll be fit.

You quit, you lose, you fail, that's a fact,
So put your best foot forward, and give it your best crack.
Don't bother what other people think or say,
Just be true to yourself, and your goals will not sway.

Learn something new every day, it's the key,
To a life that is filled with possibility.
Don't make assumptions, they can lead you astray,
Just open your eyes, and your mind will pave the way.

Believe in yourself, that's the final key,
To unlock the door to your destiny.
With these lessons in mind, you'll go far,
And shine like the moon and the brightest star.

Tuesday 7 February 2023

What Is Time (Part I)




So what is time, really? We could start with the standard definition, of course: “the fourth dimension… a measure in which events can be ordered from the past, through the present, into the future… also the measure of durations of events and the intervals between them.” But does that definition truly capture the essence of time? Perhaps not.

As Einstein once remarked, “[time] is not at all what it seems. It does not flow in only one direction, and the future exists simultaneously with the past. The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” So what are we to make of that? Is time a mere fabrication of our minds, a construct that we impose on the world around us? Or is it a more fundamental aspect of reality, something that transcends our limited human perception?

It’s worth considering the role of our senses in all this. Our experience of the external physical world comes to us via one of the twenty-one or so-known human senses. But these senses are both fallible and ever so slightly delayed. For instance, it takes approximately eighty milliseconds for the sensation of touch to travel from the fingertip, through the nervous system and into the brain to be decoded and interpreted. The same logic applies to all our other senses. We experience everything about eighty milliseconds in the past. So are we ever truly living in the ‘here and now’?

And what of the units we use to measure time — seconds, hours, days, months, years? Who came up with these terms, and why do we use them? The answers may surprise you. But one thing is clear: whether we’re talking about the passage of a single millisecond or the arc of an entire year, time remains one of the most enigmatic and fascinating phenomena in the universe.

The concepts of a second, hour, day, month, and year all flow together into an inscrutable river of moments, oscillating and multiplying like subatomic particles within an atom.

Days and years come to us by way of the great celestial dance between the Earth, Sun, and Moon, but they’re all subject to the slight distortions of human measurement, a cosmic foxtrot that never quite syncs up to the beat.

The Moon’s gravitational pull ebbs and flows like a quarter-daily tidal wave, while the lunar cycle is the rough inspiration for our man-made months. But why are these units so inconsistently shaped and numerically diverse?

A minute passes in sixty seconds, but why sixty? Could it have been fifty or seventy-five? These questions might cause a ripple in the mind, but the answer lies in the vibration of a caesium 133 atom. A second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 oscillations within one of these atoms — naturally!

Who first dreamed up these chronometric units, and what were their intentions? Perhaps they were scholars, scientists, or philosophers, trying to impose an order onto the turbulent flow of existence. Or maybe they were just folks looking for a way to kill time.

The notion of time as we know it today is a purely human invention. The minute is a derivative of the Latin word ‘minuta’, meaning short note, and has no natural equivalent. The concept of hours can be traced back to the Babylonians and was later adopted by the Greeks. However, these hours varied in length, as daylight hours changed with the seasons. It was only in the fourth century in Europe that standard, or sidereal hours, were established, and even as late as the sixteenth century, hours could still be irregular in duration.

The week is thought to have originated from the lunar cycle, segmented into four discreet seven-day periods. Later, the seven-day Jewish week and the spread of Christianity cemented the week as a human convention. In Old English, the word for week was ‘wece’, which means change of direction, while the Old Norse word ‘vika’ means changing of oars, both accurately conveying the impact of the week on the human mind.

The week forces us into a monotonous routine, repeating itself predictably every seven days. It is also intimately linked with work and trains us to live our lives to a routine. But what if all days were equal? How would that change the way we approach work and leisure time? These questions are worth pondering.

Next, the month, the messiest of all man-made units of time. It’s a real head-scratcher, isn’t it? The Moon orbits the Earth thirteen times a year, giving us thirteen neat lunar months of twenty-eight days each. Simple, right? So why do we have twelve lopsided months of varying lengths? Thirty days for some, thirty-one for others, and poor February only gets twenty-eight, except in leap years. Why is September the ninth month, rather than the seventh, and why is October the tenth month, not the eighth? It’s a right kerfuffle.

And let’s not forget that the weeks don’t even line up with the months, except for February, which always seems to get the short end of the stick. Imagine if the centimetres on a ruler were all different lengths. Ludicrous, isn’t it? So why do we put up with this ugly asymmetry in our calendar? Why do we have a calendar at all?

Well, the answer lies in the word calendar itself. It comes from the Latin word “calends,” which was used to describe the monthly payment of debts and bills. Coincidence? I think not. Throughout history, calendars have been a powerful tool used by the ruling classes to control and tax the common folk. Everything from meetings to paychecks to leisure time is governed by the calendar and clock. It’s a rhythm of life that we’ve all grown accustomed to, but it’s a predictable and artificial pattern created by man, primarily with the aim of control and the motivation of greed.

The Gregorian calendar, introduced by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, is the most widely used calendar in the world today. It’s a refinement of the Julian calendar, introduced by Julius Caesar in 45 BC, which was itself a refinement of an earlier Roman calendar that had only ten months and started with Martius (now known as March). More months were added over time for various reasons, eventually bringing the total to thirteen. With the lunar cycle of thirteen months, it would have been perfect to stop there. But Julius Caesar had other ideas, didn’t he?

You see, back in 46 BC, the transition from the Roman calendar to the new Julian calendar required an entire year of 445 days! Yes, you heard me right, 445 days! And understandably, that year became known as the ‘year of confusion.’ But that’s just the beginning of this wild tale.

Julius Caesar, the man behind this change, had abolished a leap month called Mercedonius and renamed Quintilis (initially the fifth month) to Julius. His successor, Augustus, was so impressed with this that he did the same with Sextilis (initially the sixth month) and renamed it Augustus. But here’s where it gets really interesting. Augustus was dismayed to discover that Julius’ month had one more day than his, so he did what any self-respecting emperor would do: he took a day from February, the already shortest month, to ensure both months had the same length. In other words, the reason months are months is because of a competition between two men who couldn’t agree on whose testicles were bigger.

But let’s take a step back and think about the impact of all this. You see, many ancient civilizations used a 28-day lunar cycle, which wasn’t an accident. Humans have been living in harmony with natural cycles for over 150,000 years, and for most of that time, our survival depended on it. But the creation of artificial routines like weeks and months has detached us from the natural cycles we’ve grown accustomed to.

Take women, for example. The 28-day menstrual cycle aligns perfectly with the lunar cycle. In ancient times, before the construction of weeks and months, women would have their menstruation aligned with the new Moon and their ovulation aligned with the full Moon. Imagine the impact this might have had if all women’s menstrual cycles were aligned.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. This is all very interesting, but what does it all mean? Well, my dear audience, that’s a question for another time. Join me for the next part of this fascinating tale, where we’ll explore the true impact of artificial time on the human psyche and what we can do to reclaim our connection to the natural cycles that have sustained us for millennia. Until then, keep questioning everything, my friends!

Monday 21 May 2018

The Greatest Speech Ever Made



Transcript:

I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone - if possible - Jew, Gentile - black man - white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness - not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.

Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.

The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men - cries out for universal brotherhood - for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world - millions of despairing men, women, and little children - victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.

To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish. …..

Soldiers! don’t give yourselves to brutes - men who despise you - enslave you - who regiment your lives - tell you what to do - what to think and what to feel! Who drill you - diet you - treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate - the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!

In the 17th Chapter of St Luke it is written: “the Kingdom of God is within man” - not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people have the power - the power to create machines. The power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.

Then - in the name of democracy - let us use that power - let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world - a decent world that will give men a chance to work - that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfil that promise. They never will!

Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfil that promise! Let us fight to free the world - to do away with national barriers - to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers! in the name of democracy, let us all unite!

Final speech from The Great Dictator Copyright © Roy Export S.A.S. All rights reserved



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Thursday 12 April 2018

The Only People For Me

 


“[...]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars"

Jack Kerouac

Sunday 26 November 2017

Hope


"Hope, in reality, is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torment of man."

Friedrich Nietzsche    

Monday 4 April 2016

The Cycle of Pain: Understanding the Roots of Aggression and Moving Towards Compassion

It's hard to deny the overwhelming sense of hurt and frustration that arises when we are on the receiving end of someone's hurtful behaviour. In those moments, it can be all too easy to feel a seething anger and a desire for retribution. We may feel that the only way to address the pain is to lash out in turn, to make the person who caused us suffering experience the same level of hurt that we have felt.

And yet, upon closer examination, we often find that this desire for revenge is rooted in a deep sense of pain and vulnerability. The wounds we carry may be old and difficult to heal, and the actions of others can re-open those wounds with alarming ease. In this sense, it is not so much the individual who has caused us harm that we hate, but rather the pain and fear that we associate with that experience. It is only by acknowledging and addressing that pain that we can hope to move past it and create a more compassionate and understanding world.

Consider the notion that every act of cruelty or aggression stems from a place of pain. A person who inflicts harm upon another is often carrying a weight of suffering within themselves that they cannot bear alone. It is this internal struggle that spills over and manifests as outward aggression.

But is punishment the answer? Is it enough to simply castigate and condemn the offender, without ever examining the root cause of their behaviour? Surely, if we hope to make any meaningful change, we must first offer help to those who are suffering.

Understanding the source of another's pain requires a deep sense of empathy and compassion. It is only through this lens that we can begin to recognize the humanity in all people, even those who have caused us harm. Only then can we hope to create a world in which healing and growth are possible for all.

Wednesday 11 November 2015

Remembrance Day


Poppy appeal image

On this Remembrance Day, millions will stop at 11 am to remember those lost in military conflicts and wear the red poppy. But I won't. The poppy, inspired by the poem "In Flanders Fields," honours the sacrifices of the Armed Forces, but not the enemies' servicemen, women, or civilians. The UK has seen "poppy fascism," where people expect others to wear it, and there's uproar when someone chooses not to.

All loss of life is tragic, and I believe all life is equal, regardless of gender, colour, race, or religion. It's hard for me not to feel more sympathy for an innocent Iraqi civilian than a military serviceman who had a choice to be there. The military profession can no longer be seen as honourable. Those serving should question if their motives align with those of who they fight for.

My children's great-great grandparents fought (and died) in the Great War... for the enemy! They too were victims, innocent pawns sent to their deaths with no choice. I'd like to pay my respects to all my family on Remembrance Day, not just half. A red poppy to some would be quite an insult. All lives are worthy of remembrance. #RemembranceDay #redpoppy #honoringall





Thursday 4 September 2014

Difficult


I’m often difficult to love.
I go through dark periods like the moon and I hide from myself.
But I promise I will kiss your wounds when they’re hurting. 
Even if they’re in your soul,
I can find them with the light in my fingertips.
I will lead you to the river so you can remember
 How beautiful it feels to be moved by something that is out of your control.
And when our dark periods match, we can breathe with the grass and look at the night sky.
The stars will remind us of the beauty in our struggles,
And we won’t feel lost anymore.



Sunday 20 July 2014

The Paradoxical Commandments

The Paradoxical Commandments
by Kent M. Keith


  • People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centred. Love them anyway.
  • If you do good people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives. Do good anyway.
  • If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies. Succeed anyway.
  • The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway.
  • Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable. Be honest and frank anyway.
  • The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds. Think big anyway.
  • People favour underdogs but follow only top dogs. Fight for a few underdogs anyway.
  • What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway.
  • People really need help but may attack you if you do help them. Help people anyway.
  • Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth. Give the world the best you have anyway.


Saturday 19 July 2014

Becoming A Freethinker And A Scientist


By Albert Einstein
Open Court Publishing Company,
LaSalle and Chicago, Illinois, 1979. pp 3-5.

When I was a fairly precocious young man I became thoroughly impressed with the futility of the hopes and strivings that chase most men restlessly through life. Moreover, I soon discovered the cruelty of that chase, which in those years was much more carefully covered up by hypocrisy and glittering words than is the case today. By the mere existence of his stomach everyone was condemned to participate in that chase. The stomach might well be satisfied by such participation, but not man insofar as he is a thinking and feeling being.

As the first way out there was religion, which is implanted into every child by way of the traditional education-machine. Thus I came - though the child of entirely irreligious (Jewish) parents - to a deep religiousness, which, however, reached an abrupt end at the age of twelve. Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression. Mistrust of every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude toward the convictions that were alive in any specific social environment-an attitude that has never again left me, even though, later on, it has been tempered by a better insight into the causal connections.

It is quite clear to me that the religious paradise of youth, which was thus lost, was a first attempt to free myself from the chains of the "merely personal," from an existence dominated by wishes, hopes, and primitive feelings. Out yonder there was this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking. The contemplation of this world beckoned as a liberation, and I soon noticed that many a man whom I had learned to esteem and to admire had found inner freedom and security in its pursuit. The mental grasp of this extra-personal world within the frame of our capabilities presented itself to my mind, half consciously, half unconsciously, as a supreme goal. Similarly motivated men of the present and of the past, as well as the insights they had achieved, were the friends who could not be lost. The road to this paradise was not as comfortable and alluring as the road to the religious paradise; but it has shown itself reliable, and I have never regretted having chosen it.



Friday 18 July 2014

Nobody Is Smarter Than You Are

"Ideology is only going to get in your way. Nobody is smarter than you are." - Terence Mckenna


Wednesday 16 July 2014

Perception

If we looked at the sky we'd both agree that it was blue, but would the colour we perceive in our minds be the same? 

Could your perception of blue be my orange, or your green, my red? It's an interesting concept and a difficult one to definitively prove either way. 

Our perception of what is 'real' is subject to... our perception! A beautiful paradox which Plato describes perfectly in the story of 'The Cave' 

It's truly mind-boggling to think about the subjectivity of our perception of reality. When I see the colour blue, do you see it the same way I do? We might both look up at the sky and agree that it's blue, but the blue that I experience could be different from the blue that you see.

What if your perception of blue is my orange, or my green is your red? The idea that two people can see the same thing and experience it differently is a fascinating concept, and one that has stumped philosophers and scientists for centuries.

This is where the idea of subjective reality comes into play. Our perception of what is "real" is determined by our own perception, and no two people will ever experience the same thing in exactly the same way. It's a beautiful paradox that has been described in the story of "The Cave" by Plato.

We live in a world that is constantly changing, and our perception of it is constantly evolving. It's important to remember that what is "real" to us might not be "real" to someone else, and that's okay. It's what makes our world so diverse and unique.

The Abolition of Work

The passage below was written way back in 1985 by the American author and anarchist Bob Black. His words seem all the more relevant today ...

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 revolution. By "play" I mean also festivity, creativity, 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.

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 time spent recovering from work and in the frenzied but hopeless attempt to forget about work. Many people return from vacations so beat that they look forward to returning to work so they can rest up. The main difference between work and leisure is that at 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 or "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 Nicaragua 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 millennia, 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, rote-work, 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 de-Stalinized 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 a 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 to work from school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home in the end, are habituated to hierarchy 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 hierarchy 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 labelled 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. 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 as 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 him- self 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 ancien regime wrested substantial time back from their landlords' 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 to the colonies. But the Indians no more defected to white settlements than West 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 in Evolution. (Kropotkin was a scientist 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. 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 signalled not the end of social unrest but the beginning of a new, uncharted phase unconstrained and uninformed by ideology.

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. 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 25 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. What the statistics don't show is that tens of millions of people have their lifespans shortened by work -- which is all that homicide means, after all. Consider the doctors who work themselves to death in their late 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.

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 argues persuasively that -- as antebellum slavery apologists insisted -- factory wage-workers in the North American states and in Europe were worse off than Southern plantation slaves. No rearrangement of relations among bureaucrats 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 wouldn'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 flunkies 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 ensure 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 last 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 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. 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 and 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, and 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 should 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 push button 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. 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 fuelling 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 about 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 theres' 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 brother's Communitas is exemplary for illustrating what forms follow from given functions (purposes), and there is something to be gleaned form 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 Everyday 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 workers' 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 will 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.

Workers of the world... RELAX!

This essay as written by Bob Black in 1985 and is in the public domain. It may be distributed, translated or excerpted freely. It appeared in his anthology of essays, "The Abolition of Work and Other Essays", published by Loompanics Unlimited, Port Townsend WA 98368 [ISBN 0-915179-41-5].



Tuesday 15 July 2014

Insane Words Of Wisdom



An interview with a homeless man in New York City beautifully reveals the meaning of life.

(Transcript below)

(Interviewer)
What do you think the meaning of life is?

(Homeless man)
To live in the mystery and to find purpose.
And to live in the now.
Magic.
Love.
Now

What's your most adventurous memory?

This, I remember this.
This is an adventure.
This is the memory.

What advice do you have for younger generations?

What advice do I have for younger generations?
Live in the moment.
Don't get old.
Don't judge people, because you can't be free if you judge people.
Love. Now.
Create.
Inspire.

How do you define freedom?

By doing what you love.

What do you love?

This. The moment.
Love. Now.
It repeats.

What other advice do you have for us?

That you're always doing what's in your heart.
You can't get away from your heart.
Because life is a paradox.
It's a mirror of confusion.
So, love, now.

Who do you love?

I love all of you.