Francis Mont's Blog, page 13

There comes a time

There comes a time when you are fed up to the teeth
with people ramming bullshit down your throat:
politicians, TV ads, company presidents,
the whole bloody lying lot,
urging you to deny your common sense
and trust their brand of deliverance.

Life itself is simple,
they don’t have to invent ninety nine dollars and ninety nine cents,
to con you into believing it’s less than a hundred,
they don’t have to pretend that poison is good in the air
and your biggest concern is the colour of your hair.

One ad lures you into eating fattening food,
the other sells programs on how to lose weight,
knowing you would never prevail
but continue straight into obesity, diabetes, unhappiness,

that they could sell pills upon pills to cure
or send you to doctors, spiritual healers and psychiatrists
to prevent you from cutting your wrist
or blowing your brains out in depression,
even though they could profit from the congregation

lamenting your early demise
in a ten thousand dollar funeral
that you could buy insurance to finance:
they will show you TV ads for your guidance.

When will you have enough of this blatant attempt
to corrupt your thinking, rot out your brain,
make you believe that white is black and evil is good?

You should believe in simple things you can understand
like being creative, helpful and compassionate
to your fellow inhabitants of this godforsaken planet…

Abandon this misguided faith
in the deceitful bastards pretending to be smart…
and trust the better advice
of your own brain and your own heart.

'Needs' versus 'Wants'

I assume everyone is familiar with the old debate about our ‘needs’ versus our ‘wants’.

It is important to differentiate our needs from our wants. I define ‘Needs’ as those requirements commonly identified with survival of the individual as a healthy (both physically and mentally) self-aware biological entity living in a society of his own species.

I define ‘Wants’ as those requirements that are not essential for survival—they are mere luxuries that can enhance one’s zest for life, the flavor of one’s existence, but there would be no serious negative consequence to life and health if they were denied.

Of course, I realize that I just opened a can of worms. You pick a hundred human beings and you get a hundred different answers as to where to draw the line between needs and wants . It is impossible to come up with a sharply drawn boundary. It is also unnecessary (I remember reading about a mother who used a drug-store precision scale to divide a chocolate bar exactly equally for her two children). There are a number of things on which everyone can readily agree. We can say that food is a need and a diamond necklace is a want.

In a functioning society based on organized production, we have no difficulty describing food, housing, clothing, medical help, education, transportation and communication as needs. Luxury yachts, ten rooms per person mansions, gold serving dishes, half-million-dollar cars, etc would be described by most people as mere wants.

So, if we start out at the extremes and proceed systematically towards the middle, somewhere in a zone of not-being-quite-sure-any-more, we can draw our line arbitrarily.

We don’t have to quibble. As far as I am concerned, we can draw the line anywhere in that zone. We would have made enormous progress.

If I try to make a list of my own basic needs, I come up with the following:

Personal needs: Food, Clothes, Home, Energy, Medical help, Meaningful work, Exercise, Sleep, Rest, Privacy, Play, Beauty, Nature, Animals. Social needs: Mate, Family, Friends, Community, Transportation, Communication, Education, Entertainment, Justice, Interdependence. I am sure I missed a few but I believe that all my really essential needs are there.

If I had a life that satisfied all these needs in balance and harmony, I know I would be a contented person. And it is very important to differentiate between ‘contended’ and ‘happy’.

We often feel happy when we are excited, thrilled, having a ‘high’ of some form. This feeling ‘high’ can be stimulated by artificial means (like drugs, alcohol, sky-diving, etc.) that are not real needs.

And the consumerist capitalistic system cashes in on this artificial addiction to ‘excitement’ and ‘thrills’. Not only cashes in, but actively promoting it via TV and other media ads.

I think it is important to satisfy our needs in a good balance. Most people have a lot of some and almost nothing of others.

Many have almost no meaningful work, even though they spend most of their time at a place where they are supposed to have lots. They have practically no time for exercise, play, beauty.

Many also don’t have any really close friends; no community to speak of, hardly any time for education and entertainment. This isn’t the life most people would choose.

Our lives are shaped more by convention, social pressure, inertia and accidents than by intelligent planning.

In this sense, we are truly 'created' in god's image.

The simplest things

The simplest things are, by far, the hardest to see:
we’d rather drown in complications;
when we could just simply, happily, be,
we choose to suffer in self-created abominations.

We invent ideologies, wars, financial meltdowns
when all we need to do is: produce,
distribute and consume what we really need
and stop making so many mouths to feed.

Bears, wolves, elk are smarter:
hunt and forage for survival
without trashing their habitat
they are not, like us, suicidal.

We waste our enormous brains
on weapons of mass destruction,
and drag the bears, wolves and elk with us
into our self-created mass extinction.

The Nature of Money

The basic issue is very simple.

What is a country? It is a group of people residing on a well-defined territory, using division of labor to produce necessities (and luxuries) and sharing what is produced.

Production is science and technology, organization and labour. We need farms and factories and energy and transportation and communication. We need the same things under communism, capitalism, anarchy, monarchy or fascist dictatorship. Ideology makes no difference: if we do not produce, we die. We can do it better or worse, more or less efficiently, more or less messily, but we all have to produce food, build houses, weave fabric, run trains, maintain phonelines.

Production is not the issue. Distribution is.

We tend to think in terms of money. But money is only the hat a magician pulls rabbits out of. We do not eat it, wear it, or heat our houses by shoveling paper bills into the furnace. If we want to understand what happens in the world, we must try to explain what is REALLY happening, leaving money out of it.

Take the economic output of the planet in a one-year period. Concentrate only on food, housing, clothing, furniture, transportation, communication, health-care and education. These are the essential products that we need for healthy survival. So much is produced during one year. Most of it is distributed. It gets into individual hands; it is owned and consumed by individual people. That is what matters.

If I have a billion dollars in the bank (or under the mattress) and never use it, I am poor. What makes me rich is not a figure on a sheet of paper or in a computer’s memory chips. What makes me rich is my share of the communally-produced cache of goods. The house I live in, the car I drive, the quantity and quality of food I eat, the clothes I wear, the neighborhood I can afford to live in, the school I send my kids to, the vacations I take. That is what makes me rich or poor, not the money I own.

Money is a fiction, not part of the reality we were born into. It is not necessary for survival. Money is a human invention for simplifying and facilitating trade. It would have been completely superfluous had we decided to share equally. Then only production and distribution would be required. It is unknown in primitive societies that share equally.

But we decided not to share equally, because this would not be fair. We don’t want to feed the lazy and incompetent (or his children) and we don’t want to deprive the more diligent and talented. We created money to make sure that we don’t distribute products equally. Well, we got our wish. Just look at the world.

Now, instead of producing and consuming and living healthy, happy lives, we have wars, famines, pollution, poverty and despair.

Money serves as the greatest con of all time.

Replacing the simple issue of surviving well on a lonely planet in a vast Universe, money created an insane-asylum of banks, interest rates, currency supply, tax-cuts, subsidies, grants, off-shore accounts, inflation, recession, deficit-financing, leveraged buyouts, credit-rating, hostile takeovers, toxic assets, derivatives, stocks, bonds, investment portfolios and CEO compensation packages.

We wanted to make sure that no person could cheat others. So we invented money. Now money is the primary medium of cheating each other out of our share. Just look at the number of rich, unproductive parasites living in obscene luxury and the number of hard-working, productive people who have difficulty feeding their children and keeping a roof over their heads.

The only way to create a utopia is by resolving the age-old problem of distribution. If humanity abandoned the concept of money and started to share equally, we would gain by eliminating an enormous waste of resources on the mechanisms required to maintain the financial system (most of government, all of finance, most of enforcing, insurance, welfare, much of the judicial system; etc., etc.)

My feeling is that - even if 10-20 percent of people would decide not to contribute to production, we would still be better off. The percentage of non-contributing people is a lot higher now,(children, students, elderly, incapacitated, incarcerated, homeless) even before we count those who are employed in the activities that would be eliminated.

We humans are creatures of habit. At birth we inherit a world with its millions of facts and billions of connections, and never really think to ask fundamental questions about the principles by which humanity is organized. We only want to tinker with the surface, not touching the foundations. The few who dare to question basic assumptions, we recoil from, we call them crackpots, immature or insane, but we never dare to wonder whether they may be right.

Once I read a UN report that calculated the % of resources and man-hours spent on non-productive activities. It was estimating up to 90%.

This non-productive work fell in three categories:

Money-related activities/resources:

planning, printing, distributing, destroying, banking, guarding, handling, speculating, trading, exchanging, collecting, reporting, insuring, taxing, investigating, prosecuting, etc., etc., etc.

Fighting over distribution:

Wars, revolutions, armies, armament industries, police, crowd control, courts, lawyers, monetary/financial/tax legislation, oversight, lobbyists, security industry/personnel, bailouts/grants/subsidies, prisons, prison guards and industry, etc., etc., etc.

Profit-related activities:

Producing in slave-economies and shipping long distance to rich economies, fossil fuel industries and related cleanup activities, man-made global warming and environmental cost, ill-health, hazardous waste disposal, hanging on to obsolete technologies, killing off innovation, etc., etc., etc.
All this waste is due to our inability to do simple arithmetic.

We waste 90% of our resources in order to control our consumption with the monetary system, without which we could spend these resources multiplying our production capacity ten-fold, producing plenty for all conceivable needs (except for the pathological kind). Without this waste no control (and money) would be required. The expression: "Penny-wise and pound-foolish" comes to mind.

As an added benefit: people would have to work a lot fewer hours, live in a lot less stressful environment, would live longer and healthier, would find it easier to cooperate, crime would plummet and threat of extinction disappear. Extreme poverty like lack of adequate food, housing, medical help and education would belong to a stupid and barbaric past (which is our present now).
Planning for basic necessities (and related infrastructure) would require intelligence, technical/scientific/demographic knowledge and competence, organizational abilities and long-term thinking.

Definitely not for our species!

I made a mistake today: I listened to the news. I haven’t done this for some time, and was surprised how it sounded. Like a country under siege.

Apparently, we can not do anything to help those in need, and even have to stop much of the help we have been giving, because there is no money. I counted: sixteen out of seventeen news items had to do with lack of money (The seventeenth was about rescuing a dog that fell in the lake -- the only story that made any sense).

In our culture, the habit of thinking in terms of money is so deeply ingrained that nobody seems to find another topic. It is bloody boring, to say the least, that our entire civilization is stuck in the financial groove.

There were times in history, not even too long ago, when people recognized other values.

The history of Canada, until quite recently, is the history of nation building. All the social institutions we are so proud of: universal health care, pensions, unemployment insurance, high quality public education all represent ideals not measured by profit.

Now at the beginning of the twenty-first century, all we seem to care about is money and power. How can this culture be so primitive?

We are atomized into alienated little islands; suspicious at one another, snarling and baring our fangs at anyone who comes near; clutching our wallets possessively, while eying the bulging purses of our rich with envy and resentment. We are fighting over money like a wolf-pack tearing the prey apart, snarling and snapping at each other while gulping down what we can.

I think mankind needs a refresher-course in philosophy, to put things in perspective. The ancient Greek philosophers were so much smarter than we are. They knew about balance and harmony and didn’t turn themselves into tiny cogs to fit in a big machine. They wanted it all: math, science, technology, arts, sports, politics. Greedy buggers, they were not content to be only merchants and bean-counters.

We have all heard the expression “renaissance man” as stories filter down to our stultified existence about larger-than-life adventurers who had more than one interest and wanted to hog as much life as their energy and imagination would support.

There were times when people wanted to soar above the clouds and experience all the wonders of existence. Now, machines do our soaring for us, while we are stuck with our noses in financial records, groaning and moaning how we can not fix or improve anything.

So what am I talking about? I am talking about money and how boring the subject is.

Money is a human invention to facilitate trade. It is a medium of exchange, nothing more. It is not a law of nature, not a basic fact of existence, not a god, not even an important discovery.

What is important is this marvelously rich planet we live on, with its plentiful resources (until we waste it on heedless gluttony) with its benign climate (until we destroy it with global warming, pollution and acid rain) our accumulated knowledge in science and technology (that could provide plenty for everybody) and the incredible beauty that artists have created for our joy (until it drowns in worship of ugliness and the basest drives to raw sex and violence).

We say, nothing can be done for lack of money. Why? We need time; we need resources; we need manpower. We stand paralyzed, and let our cities disintegrate and our roads crumble and our children go hungry - even though we have plenty of bricks to build houses; plenty of idle people to build roads; so much food that it often rots in our warehouses.

Why?

Because we have no money?

Who the hell cares about money? If this human invention does not do its job, helping us to exchange things, than why bother with it?

Has it become a god that rules our every breath from cradle to grave? Would a sane civilization allow an invention of its own to paralyze it into helpless stagnation, abandon things that urgently need doing, even though it had everything required to do them?

If a group of us were shipwrecked on a desert island, would we starve to death because we had no money to facilitate trade? Of course not. We would get busy building huts and planting crops to make our lives as comfortable as we could.

Why can we not do it now? What is the difference? The unmanageable size of the group that can hide the lazy and the parasitic? The smoke-screen created by those who want us to be confused so we do not see that, while we produce, they wallow in luxury without contributing?

Instead of building community, based on interdependence (which is what ‘community’ means), producing and sharing, we are asked to put our faith in hare-brained dogmas like “trickle-down economics”, “small government”, “fiscal responsibility”, “tax-cuts for the rich” (to stimulate the economy) that have been proven false time after time (of course almost nobody reads History any more).

Ayn Rand in her big speech about money in Atlas Shrugged said: “money or guns – make your choice”.

We did. Now we have both.

Proposal for a new social contract

We are a species of contradictions:

Co-operation and competition; desire for freedom and for power; generosity and greed; loyalty and enmity

In a social context this duality manifests itself as freedom from, and compassion for, one another.

The different social systems in our history were built on different assumptions of human nature.

- Capitalism assumes that our primary motivation is greedy self interest (freedom and competition)
- Communism is built on the assumption that we can be like a family, each caring equally for all (compassion and sharing).
- Socialism of various kinds try to find a compromise between those extremes.

So far without much success, because the compromises were arbitrary, piecemeal, without a clearly defined principle.

Can we find a compromise acceptable to most people?

I believe we can.

Let’s agree that we acknowledge both of our needs: freedom from, and compassion for, one another. Let us agree that the compassion part has priority, up to where the basic survival needs of every citizen in our country is assured. Beyond this point our priorities change and our need for freedom takes over.

The concept I have in mind is a variety of the ‘Basic Income Alternative’ a policy that has been and is currently studied by various western governments (including Ireland and Canada).

In my version, we have a two-compartment economy, with the two parts completely isolated from each other. One, the public sector, is communist in nature, while the second, the private sector, is pure capitalism.

In the public sector, basic human needs are the responsibility of the national government and takes priority over every other human activity. In the public sector there is no money.

The government is in charge of all the industries and infrastructure (without exception) required to provide basic human needs: food, clothing, housing, health, education, communication, transportation.

The government controls all the resources necessary to eliminate poverty and make sure every citizen’s basic needs are satisfied.

The basic human needs can be easily calculated by using scientific data on age-dependent calorie requirements, climate-dependent clothing and housing requirement, population-dependent health- and education-requirement and the necessary energy and raw-material production, as well as the necessary infrastructure in transportation and communication. It could be easily planned – and adapted, as conditions change - based on physiological, climatic and demographic data.

Production in this economy presupposes that the sector is self contained, the nation has all the resources required to implement this system; no foreign trade is required.

Basic human needs are very easy to satisfy - we have all the resources and the technology to do it in abundance today, if we put everything else on hold and eliminate all waste (ostentation, lavish entertainment, military, finance, duplication and competition) until basic human needs are satisfied. In my opinion no ethical human being could justify spending any amount of resources on those items I just listed, as long as there is one hungry child or homeless citizen in the country.

This does not mean that I would want to live without arts or sports or some luxuries, but the beauty of the system is that I would not have to. The key word above is ***ABUNDANCE***. With intelligent organization, elimination of wasteful competition and duplication, we could produce ***ENOUGH*** of the basic necessities to accommodate individual differences in needs and statistical fluctuations in demand, with a comfortable margin of safety.

No regulation on the individual level is necessary. The produced goods and services could be made freely available: people could just help themselves in the warehouses, find the ‘basic quality’ house they need, close to the place where they work. If basic needs are guaranteed, no sane person would bother with hoarding, so no artificial shortages would happen (the assumption being that insane persons are in a very tiny minority).

Besides being in charge of all production activity to satisfy this goal, the government will have to maintain the police and the courts to make sure the system is defended against criminals, sociopaths and psychopaths. Another beauty of the system is that once basic needs are satisfied, the level of crime, violence and destructive behavior will decrease drastically.

The time an average citizen will have to work in the Public Sector could be as low as 2-3 hours per workday. This minimal contribution can be accumulated in advance to provide for vacations and personal projects, but would not be transferable to make sure no person has a ‘free ride’. You don’t have to ‘save up’ for illness and retirement, because those are provided for by the excess safety buffer built into the system.

The government would stay the sole ‘owner’ of all natural resources that are common birthright of all citizens. Among these are primarily land, air, water, space, forests, wildlife, mineral deposits, communication frequency bands. Nobody can expropriate any of this for exclusive personal use beyond what they are entitled to in their basic needs (these needs are defined by national consensus, reached by referendum, based on scientific and demographic data).

After basic needs are satisfied and poverty, hunger, preventable illness and ignorance is eliminated from the nation; crimes are prevented to the best of the police’s ability, then the government’s task ends. It has done all in its power to make sure that basic human needs are satisfied, nobody goes hungry, no one freezes to death on a winter sidewalk, nobody gets abused by crime or exploitation, no one too young, old or sick gets neglected, no human greed and evil is allowed to rule.

The second compartment in the economy which would be completely private, and totally separate from the Public Sector and the government. Other than assuring that no criminal activity (theft, fraud, murder, pollution, inhumanity to animals, etc) is taking place in the second tier, the government is staying completely out of it.

The private sector could be organized in any way participants want to - it can have money and banks and loans and interest rates and what-have-you. It can lease excess natural resources (only in a sustainable way) from the government for its own purposes, by contributing extra benefit to the public, basic-needs production economy (they can not pay in currency because the government does not use any). The value of natural resources in terms of public service provided for its use will have to be calculated by the economic planners of the government, based on scarcity of resources versus public benefit of service provided for it. It has to be dynamic, with strict guidelines protecting it from abuse.

Nobody could be forced to participate in the ‘private sector’ of the economy, it would be strictly voluntary. If the private economy organizes itself to use a recognized common currency, then citizens could get ‘paid’ for their work in the private sector and use this money to purchase luxuries (products and services beyond basic needs) just as they do now. The private sector could do any amount of foreign trade so long as it does not compromise the public economy.

No compromise would be tolerated when it comes to basic needs and rights, the sustainability of the system, the health of the environment and the rights of other living species. Of course there are millions of details to be worked out, I only wanted to describe the basic principles of a ‘workable’ social organization. And, of course, I have no roadmap leading from ‘A’ to ‘B’ and don’t even know if such a roadmap is possible in the immediate future. However, I wanted to describe how a social organization could exist without money.

To summarize:

The essence of my system: People decide that the most important goal is to make sure everybody’s basic needs are met. They create an economy to assure that. There is no money involved, every able citizen contributes a minimum number of hours per day and the produced goods are made available to everyone freely. This economy is completely self contained: it has its power generating stations, mining, industries, agriculture, transportation and communication facilities, schools and hospitals.

Now, whoever wants more can do it in their spare time, as long as 1./ they don’t touch our economy in any way whatsoever (if they can’t do it without us, it is their problem, we will not let anything compromise the ‘prime directive’). 2./ They don’t cause damage to the environment and don’t harm anyone in the process (including other species).

As Will Durant wrote in “The Lessons of History (chapter X. - Government and History) -- “If our economy of freedom fails to distribute wealth as ably as it has created it, the road to dictatorship will be open to any man who can persuasively promise security to all; and a martial government, under whatever charming phrases, will engulf the democratic world”

My next project -- Social Justice issues

When I first seriously started to think of writing a book, I had already written a large number of essays about social justice issues -- something I am passionate about. When I submitted the collection to a publisher, a friendly editor suggested that I try to write about things that I am an 'expert' at, just to see how it goes. Listening to the good advice, I started writing about Physics, since that is my profession and a topic close to my heart. The book has been published and is doing moderately well, so I am thinking again about social justice issues. The other book that I have already published is my poetry collection, and in that book I touched on these issues in poem form -- a condensed version of the essays I originally thought of publishing. These poems are very emotional and the logic inherent in my essays are highly condensed. So now I will try to take a second look at my essay collection and see what needs to be changed, added and deleted to make it relevant today. From time to time I will select a few short ones to publish here as a blog and see if I get any feedback from Goodreads members. I hope I do.

Kindred spirits

Still on the same theme as the previous post: singing the praise of artists everywhere:

Kindred spirits

I have been around
scientists, techies, engineers,
and I do respect the best of their kind:
infused with curiosity,
quest for knowledge,
passion to find solution
to some outlandish proposition.

But the artist,
be it musician, painter, sculptor,
wordsmith of one kind or another,
touches my soul with the grace
of impractical creation:
they search for symmetry, allure,
in playful application.

Most of them never earn
minimum wage
with their craft,
they are almost happy to give it
freely away to those who understand
and share the experience --
it is their deliverance.

It seems selfless
to abandon riches, success,
financial rewards
that come in business, politics,
celebrity status,
but it is the most selfish thing
one can ever strive for:

Creating beauty
is god’s very own right,
and to do it in spite of being only human
elevates the creator of the art
to an existence that few can find
outside of mythical heaven.

A glimpse of hope

I spent the last few days driving around the countryside and visited dozens of art studios, in what is called here the "Autumn Leaves Studio Tour". I met so many talented, intelligent, NICE young people that my misanthropy withered on the vine and I started to see glimpses of hope. That is the background to the following poem:

A glimpse of hope

It’s a curse to be obsessed
with the big picture of human destiny:
that’s where most of the pain, tragedy,
brutality, betrayal awaits
the unwary traveler
who finds the new medieval lords
ready to repeat
the horrific past.

It’s best to cultivate myopia:
see the bright colours, hopeful signs,
examples of human happiness
all around you: talent, compassion,
desire to help, to participate
with neighbors, friends, strangers
in a human tribe.

And, maybe, just remotely maybe,
all these millions of small people
we can see if we open our eyes,
will, in the nick of time,
have a redeeming effect on our destiny…
…and when we look back to see how it all happened,
we may find how the small triumphed over the big,
how, in the long run, evil never had a chance.

Saturn

My poetry collection giveaway has ended.

I thank all who participated and hope the winners will give me feedback. That is the way one can become a better writer.

Here is a sample:


Saturn

The pale, pastel-pink globe,
embraced by jaunty rings,
on a vast, star-studded sky,
drifted, slowly,
across my viewfinder.

…Earth slowly rotated
under my feet,
summer-dawn breeze
gently ruffled my hair…

Saturn was there, immutable,
following its path of causes and effects,
and I thought of Galileo,
who laboured over a block of glass,
grinding it into a lens,
to behold the same planet…

…and, through a gap of four hundred years,
he and I
looked into each other's eyes.

The Mystery...

My book "Humane Physics" was recently offered as a free giveaway. The event ended on September 26th.

The link to the event is: https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sh...

I want to thank all who participated and hope that those who won a copy will enjoy reading it.

Here is a sample:

Let me tell you what Physics means to me.

It may be the way to finding the god I have never believed in. It is a door to a universe full of secrets and miracles and mystery. It is Alice's Wonderland, where everything is different from what you expect. Space and time is one and curved; simultaneity is an illusion; forever can last only a second, and a minute may last forever. Cause and effect may change roles and, if you didn't pay attention to the sound of the falling tree, you may have made it 'never happened'.

Physics is a window to look at the birth (and death) of the universe; it allows you to read messages from billions of years in the past, before the atoms making up the planet you stand on were created. Physics is the rapidly increasing heaviness that paralyses your body as you approach the speed of light so you can move only as in a dream - but only to the observers you are speeding away from, while you think you are going around in your normal way.

It is a world where matter can be created from nothing but energy and then turned back into radiating emptiness again; where particles can annihilate each other, winking out as they collide; where either of 'twin' particles, moving in opposite directions at the speed of light, still knows and reacts to what happens to the other; and where the entire universe may be nothing more than fluctuating vacuum, delineated by the Big Bang and the Big Crunch.

How can anything compete with miracles of this kind?