http://www.metroactive.com/features/post-technology-age-workforce.html
That article argues for a shorter work week as a way to improve the quality of our lives and curb resource consumption. I'm all for shorter work weeks, if for no other reason than wild primates spend their time lounging and socializing rather than working themselves to death and contracting stress-induced mental illnesses. This aim, greater social interaction and reduced stress, is achievable without needing to curb progress, which is not necessarily the same thing as growth. Regardless of the distinction for now, what we absolutely cannot allow is stagnation (especially not stagnation for the sake of a few profiting at the expense of the human race, which is wrong for all the same reasons PLUS morally reprehensible). The tradeoffs of protecting our environment so as not to saw off the branch we're sitting on versus not stopping our quest for knowledge and technological improvement make it harder for me to advocate for the simplicity I used to idolize.
"Growth is good," in our looking-glass world it is the opposite that
is actually true. According to the Global Footprint Network, we are
currently using 140 percent of the earth's capacity.
This is a point that I keep making in various ways, and I have trouble getting anyone to agree with me. Growth for its own sake is retarded (to me, more on this later). There's no plan. Not that there ever has been a conscious plan to biology, but in the same way that slight increases in predictive power seem to confer a survival advantage on individuals, it follows that using that power can protect our whole species from destroying the foundations of its survival. Burning up resources and piling up what we've arbitrarily decided to call "garbage" at a frantic pace without having a clue why we're doing it is the height of stupidity.
It's ok in my book to use resources classified as non-renewable to enable the jump to something else, something more stable. Think of it as a long-term loan. But that's not at all what we're doing. The lack of foresight suggests we've barely progressed from dumping our chamber pots out the window onto the street.
Back to exponential growth for its own sake, that's a problem that my economist friends seem to agree with me on in distant principle, but they agree among themselves that fixing the grossly mismanaged and misunderstood high level financial operations of countries has to come first because right now, governments and populations aren't aware of their abilities to set a direction for themselves and are at the mercy of forces they believe are outside their control. They've convinced themselves to be hostages of private finance. Under this system, banks finance sovereign nations as well as all the private enterprise that goes on in them, and they demand exponential growth because that's what makes them and their owners the most money possible. I guess I can see the point, that until governments understand and take back control of the issuance of currency, they're comparatively helpless to address pressing problems including environmentalism and reigning in growth. Putting people to work on useful tasks (which I call progress) instead of profitable self-destruction (that is, growth without appreciable progress) takes money and willpower, and right now most governments are convinced that they don't have and/or can't create the necessary money to drive progress (even if they knew what real progress meant, and there seems to be a lot of disagreement over that).
On the other hand, there's no reason we can't take on both problems at once, environmentalism and finance, since, as I see it, they're tightly connected. I haven't gotten much enthusiasm when I've suggested that. Maybe they're right, one thing at a time is more than enough work already.
The NEF argues that a shortened workweek is one of the absolute best
ways to move toward a less carbon-dependent culture. If people are
making less, they will buy less; if they buy less, pressure on the
earth's resources lets up.
And so, one wonders, when did buying tons of shit we don't need really enter the picture? The early 20th century, industrial output is booming, and some key factors come together. Factories are now capable of making enough basic, useful goods for everyone in the country without operating continuously, but both industrialists and their financial backers demand maximum profit, so the decision is made to OVER-produce with a focus shifting to less and less essential products, and then worry later how to sell this shit. Selling this shit is the impetus for advertising, but traditional advertising up to this point has usually been just a matter of trying to catch the attention of people who would have bought them anyways. This guy Edward Bernays, Freud's nephew, started making some profound insights in psychology and decided to apply them to advertising. He and Paul Mazur, of Lehman Brothers investment bank back in the day, pioneered the modern, subconsciously manipulative advertisements we're all so used to today. Together, these two Austrian-Americans used the era's emerging understanding of psychology and their study of European radio propaganda to work as advertising consultants. Convincing a generation of women to smoke cigarettes and buy packaged Betty Crocker cake mixes after carefully studying the psychology of their resistance to those products are among their claims to fame. Even the most cynical among us couldn't have come up with something Mazur said though (in 1927):
"We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. Man's desires must overshadow his needs."
They moved on to consulting for political campaigns, and I think you can guess at how that turned out. Bernays is also the reason why our water is fluoridated, which should raise some red flags. Forget the conspiracy theories, fluoridation was simply a way to turn a bothersome chemical waste that's dangerous when concentrated in piles outside of aluminum smelters and fertilizer factories into a salable asset. Turning shit into gold through the miracle of public relations. Who knows at this point whether it's good for us or slowly poisoning everyone? Any honest assessment is impossible because the propaganda has everyone afraid to question the status quo for fear of being called crazy. Powerful stuff.
The tie-in here is that everyone is used to "the engineering of consent" and not to actual group consciousness. We're used to taking silly, petty, immediate goals for granted as big and important ones. If we weren't so inundated with advertising and spin and propaganda, allowed to cool down and regain our senses, and then polled to find out what people's ideals would be for the future of humanity, I wonder what we'd find. Do we want to explore space like in sci fi, or what? It's crazy to think how much is actually possible given how much we manage to accomplish nowadays in spite of the crushing artificial restraints we've placed on ourselves.
