By Wells Group
29/10/10 Dominion Post
Slaving all day, coming home and forgetting about it, cannot be the future of work. You don’t like your job? Can you change the conditions? Or perhaps you love your job, especially the wealth and status it affords you. Do you know your neighbour across the tracks? You know that the gap between rich and poor can not be bridged by moving to a gated community. Gated communities are like castles. Is this our best idea?
Surely an advanced society would see us work less, enabling the exploration of previously unimagined states that developments in our society have rightly afforded. It is not a matter of when: it is now. We know humans are at perilous economic and environmental crossroads and yet individually we feel the pressure to work harder to earn money to consume more, in the effort to help. How worthless. Everyone rips off a system, to get the best out of it, to master something is the natural human way. However, both employers and employees are feeling punished, creating winners and losers at either end of the financial pyramid. This is something we can easily do something about.
We believe we should work less so we consume less. An economy that offers rampant consumerism as the only solution to our communal problems is irresponsible. As a society we are faced with a seemingly insurmountable mountain of problems. Problems that, because of a singular focus on money, are left unaddressed. Let’s pick an issue at random: this morning while waiting for the train, we counted the cars that went by in both directions. Out of one hundred cars, only nine carried more than one person. If you were the manager of a company paying for that level of wasted energy (which of course, you actually are) you’d be fired for the promotion and maintenance of such an incredibly inefficient system. So why are we even talking about building new roads? Is it because we as a society pay exorbitant amounts of money, to live in a perpetual dream, hoping that we will be the one in the late model Mercedes?
In contemporary society it is the media moguls, politicians and financial company directors that define the frames through which we interpret reality. They’ve assumed the grand artist’s status with their financial bonuses, sewing up the game and locking the rest of us out. We are all artists, each and every one of us. We always have been. We’ve simply ignored the responsibilities to each other that this demands. As celebrated German artist Joseph Beuys said, "Let's talk of a system that transforms all the social organisms into a work of art, in which the entire process of work is included... something in which the principle of production and consumption takes on a form of quality. It's a gigantic project."
By asking “Is this art?” we assume that something is definitively “not art” and avoid the more constructive question: “What is this the art of?” Mainstream media works in this way. The function and purpose of asking “Is this art” is to stop us from thinking and engaging with the challenge of new ideas. Of course these ideas threaten the current running show. Like glass ceilings and iron curtains, these fake barrier are put in place to extinguishing healthy debate and enforce a so-called “common sense” understanding of who we are.
Taking a break on welfare doesn’t have to be economic suicide for a country. To take a break and gain perspective is what we need a great deal of people to do. The 2010 Economics Nobel Prize winners have argued for people to receive collective wealth whilst finding a satisfying job. We all want to be productive and we also want to decide what our production is.
We need to trust people to get on with what they need to do instead of producing controls and limits that clearly are not working. We belong to a global culture of shopping addicts that need to be given the chance to find a more sustainable fashion of existence. We believe we can value and afford to give people the time and resources they need to gain new perspectives. The carbon reduction alone created by this group of low consumers could pay for the time and the positive benefit to society. To figure out how to live constructively and be satisfied with your contribution - this gift of time is a wealth that makes GDP less significant.
What we have been advocating for, is to do those things that we love, not because we are told that we love them, but because we have found real love there, enough to share.
We need to explore the idea, intellectually, of embracing our collective welfare - by taking a break.
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