The Abolition of Work by Bob Black

'
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 *un*employment. 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 some*thing*) 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 par-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 out 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 *ancien* *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 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 what 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*!'

The Perfect System and Complete Revolutionary Guide

http://occupycastlemaine.org/?p=51

"

The Perfect System

Well, most of us have pretty much figured out by now that living under our current corpratism is quite stressful, frustrating and alienating. Even if they do have a drug for all that.

But what of the alternatives?

It sure does seem like every new expedition to rectify the system for the good of mankind meets an even mightier wall to surmount; and every somewhat serious attempt at creating a grand new way of doing things somehow ends up more evil than it’s predecessor. At least that’s what the history books tell us.

I thought I, Anonymous might share with you my own carefully gathered philosophy. Yep, I’m just going to barge right in here with my own take on how we all should live our lives like I’m New Aged Utopian Moses or something. You can make it up to me by inventing your own witty -ism for my concept.

Most of you will think I’m a nutter, but some of you will think I’m a maverick. If you’re the latter I’m doing this for you, as you’re a nutter and I like you. For the rest of you, I will condense this whole thing down to just the end of this article, giving you all infinately more value per word than all of the great political philosophers who’s books you’ve never read. Combined. Also, it will succeed. It’s guaranteed by me, Anonymous.

The Perfect System – New Popular Edition

 

Overview and complete revolutionary guide condensed to the end of a single opinion article.

Overview:

It’s the near future. The planet’s seemingly inevitable peril has been averted last minute by a massive shift in human values and consciousness. Crime of all kinds virtually ends, and cities and towns become a series of vibrant communities where people care for each others needs collectively. People become rooted and instead of taking destructively from the land and environment around them, they build on it, knowing that their families will benefit from their care for generations to come. There is abundance, with seeming ease.

People dust off and finally feel fulfilled, exercising their own free will about how and when they work and rest. Despite the lack of government or corporate power, people are virtually universally guaranteed freedom of movement, housing, and all kinds of nourishment. Many spontaneously heal from their physical and mental illnesses that proved to be the product of their general dis-ease.

Somehow, through a treaty of mutual respect and care, it all works, it all stays peaceful save the occasional scuffle, immediately regretted. Nobody really wants war, and you can’t really have a war if nobody shows up. Everyone is too busy having fun or simply enjoying life.

Peace. Happiness. Fires. Drumming circles.

“Yes, Anonymous” I hear you grown, “I’ve heard your idealist Utopian hippie dream-boat doo-gooder fantasy before. You won’t succeed on your own and the masses are too brain-dead and servile to rise up with you.”


All true. Thanks for the segway.

Complete Revolutionary Guide

 

The perfect system is the simple system. Most humans today engage with a system that is immensely complex and difficult to understand. We have to be trained from an early age how to act appropriately within it. Sadly it also teaches us to be at odds with our gut feelings and concience, alienating us from our friends and family. We are shuffled like cattle from place to place in the pursuit of involving ourselves in other people’s financial transactions, mostly for the benefit of people who don’t respect us or even know us.

The truth is that we already know what to do.

Can you think of where you heard about my hippie utopia dream? In some ways it’s not too different to the way your ancestors lived for many many generations. Sure, I tainted the story somewhat with my perspective, but in essense a way of life like this is stamped on our conciousness, an instinct.

The entities that have hijacked our existence have a system is modelled on our own. The human system. It’s the structure of institution that takes us off our course. Clearly defind rules tell us how to arrange and organise for education, law, politics, sport. You reap what you sow. The campfire becomes the television, instead of promoting discussion it gives us it’s own view, expecting us to sit in silence.

Experimentation and failure are removed from education. Places for healing become sterile and empty. Our pastures are barren and dry. Leaders don’t know what to do and certainly aren’t the ones doing it. Love is kept for someone special and not shared, and hate, well, that’s applied liberally. Community is a brand. Everything that we used to care about is carved up for someone elses profit.
 
The process is quite simple, really. You just have to block out the noise a bit and listen to yourself. In case you live in upside down world and don’t know how to do this, here are a few tips to get you going:

* Reject hate and greed. As justified as you might feel, if you are acting out of hate or greed, you are not serving yourself or those you care about in the long run. Without these things blinding you, you will see things much more clearly.

* Do not allow yourself to be stressed or pressured. Ever. If something regularly stresses you, then change it. If someone attempts to engage you in a pressure filled situation, be wary. If you think stress is unavoidable, stop thinking that stress is unavoidable, and you might be able to avoid it.

* Renew your relationship with food. Cut out things that fool your taste and eat good nutritious food that you enjoy. Most importantly this food must be shared with other people, as many of them as possible and as often as possible.

* Strengthen your ties with other people, especially those who are local or family. Share your space with lots of people. If this is not possible, move. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have private space, but you determine where that begins and ends your own way. Don’t trust whoever built your fence line to set your boundaries for you.
* Don’t be afraid of giving things away, or recieving. Be creative in finding things. Money is a tool that is used to remove your power over the way you do things. Try to do as much as possible without it, and worlds of opportunity will open to you. Share space, if you have it. If you don’t, find someone who does!

Basically, group up, find a base, share resources, treat each other respectfully. Be happy and kind to yourself. There will no doubt be bumps along the path, but If you do it right, you will have the safety and stability to choose what you do in life, for the good of a wider community that you truly care about. The feeling of self empowerment gained will be second to none, and when you reach that point, we will have won.

This document is free to redistribute. Go put it somewhere. The surrounding website is “owned” by it’s respective “owners” and they don’t necessarily agree with me."

-- Anonymous

OCCUPY SAMIZDAT: COPYPASTA FOUNDATION PROGRAM

BEGIN COPYPASTA

‎"-The Anarchist Project-

1. 7 [Actually probably closer to 8, but yeah] billion people celebrate the globel collapse of capitalism and the state. And ask themselves, how do we provide food, water, shelter and a cultured social life when the cities are toxic and all the fossil fuel is now floating in a cloud over our heads?

2. As vast tracts of aggricultural land is free from corporate control, the eath is rapidly sprinkled with aggricultural communes to deal with the pressing problem of mass starvation( turns out we did not need a computor to tell us to grow food . . . and to do it quickly)

[Computers helping us find the best agricultural ecology for the local conditions would be nice though, as would a maybe helpful robotic labour... ;) All you need for a generator enough to power a computer is some copper wire to wind and a scrounged bike... This is already being done in africa]

3. Lack of transport means the aggriculureal communes have to create their own city centres. Good old mud brick is the most unfucked up and flectible resource left intact by capitalism . . . so tens, hundreds, or even thousands of communes\communities work together to build city centers within their communal networks for the exchange of food and small workshop goods. The city centers reflect the personalities of all the individually different communes\communities which in turn reflect the personalities of the individuals living in them. The citys all appear in organic, mostly rounded shapes. They are inventive and creative buildings and land scapes. Some are markets and others are museums and works of art and so on.
These cities become points of exchange that generate a social life through dymamic culure. Just like crowds of people, in the crowded cities, there is far more difference of design than sameness.

[IIRC best mudbrick is straw mixed with mud dried... I suspect housing would also be made of odds and ends like bits of metal lying around y'know, waste not want not

Scrounging will happen and there'll be a lot to scrounge

Maybe the cities will be circular >^.^< ]

4. The social fabric, is the law of culture, the law of culture is dynamic and under the decentralized control of everyone according to where they live and work. It is considered a crime to try to make a decision about someone elses home, work place, community or city. Street councils run streets. Streets have aggricultureal land and produce what ever they like. What each street delivers to market is a point of pride.

[Well ok, some circular cities, but there'll be plenty of other shapes too :D]

5. There are many languages and cultures across the globe as well as many common hybrids. Hierachical power and homogenization are considered as the enemy and many people are prepared to fight to the death to protect their freedom.

[English will probably end up being a trading language, but shakespear was always better in the original klingon]

6. Everything is organized by street councils and workers co-ops. Were every necessary, a spokes council structure links communities and guilds.

7. And yes, people have had the brains to organize roads, schools and hospitals.

8. People have also organized defence militas with rotated members to defend their communities and cities against the constant raise of small groups of troble makers such as religious nuts and capo-fascists just like they should have done 5000yrs ago.

9. Life is not just a comfortable day in the local art center, it is a challeng for many as there are alway new problems and every street has its own hall and every community its own spokes council and every city it own square or ampitheatre to discuss and deal with this sometime comfortable and some times problematic life.

[YAY!]"

BTW people freak out about global warming, or go into deep denial about it

But did you know it's greening the sahara...

Serious...

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/07/090731-green-sahara.html

I guess there's some justice in the world

Bumpity

END COPYPASTA

Cut and paste, cut and paste these are our sacred toolz :D

KEEP THE GOOD STUFF COMING PEEPS!

OCCUPY SAMIZDAT: DELETIONISM IS Teh CHEMOTHERAPY THAT IS KILLING TEH INTERT00bz

Unsourced Wikiquote no longer allows unsourced quotations, and they are in process of being removed from our pages (see Wikiquote:Limits on quotations); but if you can provide a reliable and precise source for any quote on this list please move it to Robert Anton Wilson. --Antiquary 18:11, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

Oh c'mon... *sigh* COPYPASTA! An Enlightened Master is ideal only if your goal is to become a Benighted Slave. Belief in external "obscenity" is the modern form of the witchcraft delusion. Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only own one encyclopedia. Consciousness itself is an infinite regress. This explains coincidences. Ego is a social fiction for which one person at a time gets all the blame. Every model we make tells us how our mind works as much as it tells us about the universe. These are just human symbolic games: the universe itself is bigger than any of our models; ergo, any model we make doesn't describe the universe, it describes what our brains are capable of saying at this time. Everyone look around and see if you can spot the NARCS. They're the ones who look like hippies. Excrement, incestuous person. I require my copulating currency, incestuous person. Spike Lee, as translated into "Clean". Groups are grammatical fictions; only individuals exist, and each individual is different. Humans live through their myths and only endure their realities. I have never experienced another human being. I have experienced my impressions of them. I regard belief as a form of brain damage, the death of intelligence, the fracture of creativity, the atrophy of imagination. I see anarchism as the theoretical ideal to which we are all gradually evolving to a point where everybody can tell the truth to everybody else and nobody can get punished for it. That can only happen without hierarchy and without people having the authority to punish other people. I think the joy of art is trying to convey what you perceive so that other people will perceive it more or less the same way. Art is a form of seduction. I mean, there are rapists in the intellectual world: they become politicians; the seducers become artists: we try to seduce people into our reality tunnel instead of leading them there with a gun, but we are trying to get them into our reality — our reality tunnel or our reality labyrinth or whichever it is: in my case it's a reality labyrinth. If lawyers had been present on Mount Sinai, the Ten Commandments would have twelve hundred amendments, all summing to the conclusion: The rich may ignore the rules, the poor will be hanged if they violate the smallest subordinate clause. If you think you know what the hell is going on, you're probably full of shit. This one is cited as the content of "a card on RAW's desk" in various places like Magia sexualis: sex, magic, and liberation in modern Western esotericism By Hugh B. Urban Fcp 08:24, 29 June 2011 (UTC) Most of our ancestors were not perfect ladies and gentlemen. The majority of them weren't even mammals. Most people live in a myth and grow violently angry if anyone dares to tell them the truth about themselves. Much of what the world calls sanity is really a hypnosis or dream, much of what is called lunacy is a terrible perceptiveness. Nobody sees the obvious, nobody observes the ordinary. There are more miracles in a square yard of earth than in all the fables of the Church. Nothing of any importance can be taught. It can only be learned, and with blood and sweat. Of course I'm crazy, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong. I'm mad but not ill. On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break. Parsifal, the pure fool: He is pure because he has never learned the guilt and shame that the false gnosis of the churches has imposed on the rest of us. The symbolism of his lance redeeming the wasteland is rather overt. Philadelphia merely seems dull because it's next to exciting Camden, New Jersey. Pregnancy is a kind of miracle. Especially so in that it proves that a man and woman can conspire to force God to create a new soul. Size is not a reality, but a construct of the mind; and space a construct to contain constructs. The abandoned infant's cry is rage, not fear. The average is that which no person quite ever is. The border between the Real and the Unreal is not fixed, but just marks the last place where rival gangs of shamans fought each other to a standstill. The function of Law? The recitation of the unintelligible by the unscrupulous to empty the purses of the unwary. The function of Theology? The recitation of the incomprehensible by the unspeakable to pick the pockets of the unthinking. The Grail is the womb of the beloved. The greatest prejudice that exists in the modern world, the only one almost universally accepted, is the prejudice against children. Also attributed to Reverend Loveshade The path up is the path down. The way forward is the way back. The universe inside is outside but the universe outside is inside. The Right's view of government and the Left's view of big business are both correct. The totally convinced and the totally stupid have too much in common for the resemblance to be accidental. The web of life is a beautiful and meaningless dance. The web of life is a process with a moving goal. The web of life is a perfectly finished work of art right where I am sitting now. There are gods, but there is no God; and all gods become devils eventually. There is no complete theory of anything. There is one universal sex law: Sex shall not be unregulated. We live in our fantasies and endure our realities. When the rose and the cross are united the alchemical marriage is complete and the drama ends. Then we wake from history and enter eternity. You are precisely as big as what you love and precisely as small as what you allow to annoy you. You know, I have found a new way to get high and stay spaced out for hours on end, and the government can't stop me... It's called senility... You never get "outside." What you call "outside" is another part of "inside." We're trapped in linguistic constructs... all that is is metaphor... "It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea." END COPYPASTA IT'S NOT PAPER! HOW MANY TIMES WOULD THE COPYPASTA'D TEXT ABOVE FIT INTO EVEN A CD-ROM? Let alone a terrabyte hardrive?

No more heroes, no more manifestos

It cannot be denied, that

There are no technological

Reasons why all texts, all

Films, all music ever

Recorded and preserved

Till this present time

Cannot be available

To all



Equally, it cannot be denied

That there is enough food

Produced on this earth

To feed all


Furthermore, it cannot be
Denied that robotics has
Developed to the point
That bitter toil, is
Obsolete

Given these obvious truths
The question then becomes,
How to get from the here
This state we find ourselves
In

To a state where all are fed
All work from now on,
And all work done till now
Are to the benefit of all

Despite all obstacles placed
In the path of such,
It cannot be denied
That unconscious, even
Of the fact that there are
No technological reasons
That anyone connected to
This communications network
Known as the internet
Cannot access the sum
Of all information preserved
Till this time.
People act in accordance
With a disregard for, the
Notion that products of
The mind, and spirit
Are something that can
Be owned

As according to the economic fact
That the cost of replicating data,
Is now infinitesimal

This property of data,
Its inalienable nature,
Of belonging to all
Has become an undeniable
Reality

This severance bespeaks
A further coming separation,
Between the abstract
Concept of "property"
And of material necessities,
Such as homes and possessions

Simply put, the concept that
An idea can be possessed,
Slowly but surely becomes
Exorcised from experience

Over one hundred years ago
Mathew Arnold wrote;

"It is of itself a serious calamity for a nation that its tone of feeling and grandeur of spirit should be lowered or dulled. But the calamity appears far more serious still when we consider that the middle classes, remaining as they are now, with their narrow, harsh, unintelligent, and unattractive spirit and culture, will almost certainly fail to mould or assimilate the masses below them, whose sympathies are at the present moment actually wider and more liberal than theirs. They arrive, these masses, eager to enter into possession of the world, to gain a more vivid sense of their own life and activity. In this their irrepressible development, their natural educators and initiators are those immediately above them, the middle classes. If these classes cannot win their sympathy or give them their direction, society is in danger of falling into anarchy."

Well we're all living in anarchy now, but
Anarchy without order.

Yet not so... For as the logic of this
Obsolete state presses down upon
The majority of the people of
The world, uniting us into one class
A consciousness arises, not contained
In any one person, but as a sum of our
Actions, the legislative obstacles placed
Against the natural sharing of information
Places a value on that which is liberated
Through self-declaration, such as applies
To this work, that it is in the public domain
Or through summaries desperately created
To liberate that which people find value in
Or shared in the whole in shadows and corners

These obstacles, although creating an economic drag
At the same time curate the work that has gone on
Till now, and this summary valued by the labour
That goes into the liberation

A value not defined by
The quantity of money
But instead as quality

No more heroes to follow,
The definition of a hero is someone
Who gets other people killed
And no one person can
Even pretend, or become
Against their will, the interpreter, of
This anarchy,

No more manifestos, the total
Of all this liberated knowledge is
Our manifesto

The accessibility to all of this knowledge
Our current goal

This was true before these words
Were ever written and will remain true
Even though they have been articulated

None of us alone can solve
The logistical issues denying
Some food, when there is enough
For all

Or automate production to
Render toil obsolete

But the whole is greater than the
Sum, and although none of us
Individually can create a program
That will free us, together all
as one

An arguing whole, disagreeing
At every point

We will find what we seek


And when it happens no one
Will be able to point and say
Here's how it happened
Here are the great men
Who made it so

It will just be
And then we will
Improve upon
What would seem
To us to be
Perfection

This is the law

...

Abandon theory for a moment...

After all in theory there's no difference between theory and practice;

In practice there is

Theory can sometimes be a good map, but in reality you live in the real world,
Where practice makes perfect

What does God mean?

Ignore theory for the moment, and just consider the image below

Language is at root a means for people to communicate with each other, and unlike most statements on god, this statement will make sense to anyone, from the most committed atheist to the most dedicated god-fearer...

So therefore, in practice, the true meaning behind the word "god" must tie into it somehow

SAMIZDAT: CopyPasta

LECTURE VI : 26 February "1936"---PAGE 868------------Miss Toni Wolff : Does it not also explain his dream of the devil's face in a more synthetic way? ( Wolff being a Intuition superior function type? : )--------------------Prof. Jung : That is true. The dream of the devil's face when Zarathustra showed his "other side" become more understandable now--he is the devil himself.----------------------Yea, ye also my friends, will be alarmed by my "wild Wisdom"; and perhaps ye will flee therefrom, along with mine enemies.----------------------------THIS is another "Manifestation" of that peculiar "Wotan Effect" which is so incredible. Yet it is a fact that "Old Wotan" has to certain extent [come to life again]; one "hears" of it either directly or indirectly, and if anybody predicted such a FACT "twenty years ago", it would have been thought utterly impossible. It has become a FACT to the extent that the [Attitude of the ruling party in Germany] is really against the CHURCH; they are trying to subjugate the CHURCH and to translate, as it were, the terminology of the CHURCH into a sort of Pagan BELIEF. That idea of Pagan Christianity or the German ["faith"] is of course nothing else than the {Nationalization of GOD}; they then have a specific {[national GOD]}, Wotan for the German as Jahveh was for the Jew. --------------------------[e.g.? The American Religious Right Fundamentalists "faith" is a kind of Nationalization of GOD? as Zionists Settlers are a Nationalization of GOD? as the Saudi Royal Family is a Nationalization of GOD? as Ayatollah ALi Khamenei is a Nationalization of GOD? as the Church of England/Queen is a Nationalization of GOD? etc. : )]--------------THAT is quite inevitable. And it is understandable that in the face of such even friends might be ALARMED. One "is" ALARMED! I have quite a number of German friends and I must say I am alarmed by the FACT that they are so [gripped].---------------PAGE 868 : Volume II : LECTURE VI : 26 February "1936" C.G.Jung's Nietzsche's Zarathustra.

-- Anonymous