HARD TIMES AHEAD

"When this circuit learns your job, what are you going to do?"
                                                                Marshall McLuhan
                                                                THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE

"From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared."
                                                                George Orwell
                                                                1984


   We know the jobs are not coming back.

   First they went to Third World sweatshops, now they are being done by robots, which never complain, which are not paid--slaves requiring neither food nor whipping.  Assembly lines, road crews, even food service and farms--are now highly automated, with no end in sight.  Already more humans need work than are needed to do work, producing what we can buy.  Ongoing debates are held about competition for jobs--between countries, between states, between cities.  This competition means that no matter what strategies are used, somebody winds up unemployed--no matter how low the rich peoples' taxes are, no matter how many regulations are ended, no matter how long and hard the workday.  As this trend proceeds, humanity has arrived at a crossroads.  We could enter a future in which we are freed from grueling labour, freed to create, to express ourselves, to interact and build a world of peace and comfort--to play, and benefit from the inspiration that play provides.  Or we could live in a science fiction dystopia:  a tiny few owning everything, trying to keep a slightly larger support group from getting it, while the overwhelming majority of mankind has nothing to do and is dependent for subsistence on whatever the owners feel inclined to spare.

   Missing from the future is anything like the social framework we have gotten used to:  a society in which goods and services are bought by people who work to produce them, who buy them with money they earn from working.  We are nearing the logical conclusion of five centuries of mechanization, a time when everything people need will be mechanically produced.  People will not be needed to work for a living.  They will still need a living.  Who gets what they need will depend on who is in charge.

   We now live in a global village, as Marshall McLuhan observed half a century ago.  We are all dependent on each other--a discommoding concept to many of us who were born and raised in cultural adulation of the "rugged individualist"--steeped in the notion that humanity progresses to the extent that individuals are left alone by society and its "hideous offshoot," government.  While individualism is desirable in many ways, while few of us would do without it, individualism, like any other human trait, can have harmful results when left unchecked.  As the Industrial Revolution progressed, creative, inventive, persevering individuals gave way to shrewd, greedy, relentless ones, whose greed came to dominate the world.  "Individuals" (the single humans who can not be divided into smaller groups) gave way to "capital"--individuals who made their way to the "head" of organizations--invariably by ruthless means.  Capitalists use their resources to satisfy their greed, which like any addiction, can never be satisfied.  Since capitalists' profits prevent paying workers enough to buy back all they can produce, surpluses build up, workers are no longer needed, and unemployment rises.  The capitalists solve this problem with war, whereby surplus production is blown up, along with unneeded workers.

   Socialism arose in reaction to individualism's perversion into capitalism.  If rugged individualism leads to such misery, then society must retake control.  This solution then proceeded to recreate the problem, as the heads of the "socialist" states quickly became crueler and more power-mad than the capitalists had considered, up till then.  If we have learned anything of value in the century of chaos involving those actions and reactions, it is that individuals and societies are quite interdependent, each becoming oppressive and destructive when "thinking people" are left out of the plans.  The elusive yet desirable goal is to balance the needs of society with the aspirations of individuals.  While we all have differing opinions regarding where the balance is, and these opinions will change depending on circumstances, a healthy respect for both individuals and society as a whole is apparently necessary for general human satisfaction.  People instinctively think, and humanity is better off when more people do think, and trade their thoughts.  Our civilization is not founded on the limited thinking that improves the processes of making and distributing goods and services.  Rather, productivity is a result of unlimited and unimpeded human thought.  But within the strict zone of production for compensation, thinking people get in the way.  In the end, thought becomes a criminal act.  To both capitalist and socialist ruling elites, working people are problems to be solved, and workers who think make the problems worse.  Both types of rulers are firm believers that "Ignorance is Strength."

   Whenever society comes under the control of a small clique, individuals no longer matter...in fact, they turn troublesome.  God becomes power, war consumes surplus production, and humanity ceases to progress.  But production and distribution nonetheless become more efficient, increasing the obscene wealth of a few.  Or we could use the immense productive capacity of automation to reap a world of plenty for all.  We may still have a choice, but it appears we will not have it for long.  The jobs are not coming back.  Time to commit thoughtcrime?