In the year of our Lord Jesus Christ 2000, the United States of America will no longer exist.
I am not given to prophecy but I think that one is reasonably certain.
Now, by the expression the United States of America, one can mean two quite different things. In the first place, one can mean the physical territory of North America now physically designated as the United States plus its biological and other geographical features: people, rivers, animals, plants, mountains, skies and clouds.
On the other hand, by the United States of America one can mean a political and sovereign state existing in competition with a number of other sovereign states distributed over the earth. And if the United States continues to exist in that sense and to be primarily identified with that meaning for much more than10 years, we shall create in this world a holocaust.
There are so many ways of doing it: by the obvious ones of nuclear or biological warfare, by the less obvious ones of total depredation of the wild life, pollution of the atmosphere, poisoning of the waters so that we shall erode the natural resources upon which we depend. There are so many threats from so many different quarters when you consider just adding up nuclear warfare, biological warfare, overpopulation, bad conservation, racial strife, civil war; take your choice. Either one or any mixture of them and we shan't be here. That is to day that we shan't be here in the sense of a territory-a biological world. We may exist in some abstract sense like: "See I was right after all. Better dead than red."
Staying Alive
Now herin exactly lies the problem of the future. When I make prophecies from a purely realistic and hard-boiled point of view, I tend towards the extremely gloomy side of things. I have never yet voted in an election where the candidate of my choice won the election. And I tend to feel that practical politics is a matter of assessing that human beings are so stupid that they will always do what they can do, what can be done must be done, and that we will go like the gadarene swine down the hill.
And if I were betting on it, and if I had somewhere to place my bet, I would bet on it that way. But I don't have anywhere to place my bet. And, furthermore, I can look at it from the point of view that I am not just an objective bystander looking at the situation as something which I'm going to predict about. I'm involved in it. And as I'm involved in it, I'm damned if I'm going to let it happen that way.
There is another alternative: that if the United States of America ceases to exist in our minds and in our hearts as an abstract political nation and we focus our attention instead upon the physical people and upon the physical environment and the love of it, then we have some chance of creating, by the year 2000, a most extra- ordinary state of affairs. But it is based upon the realization of that distinction between the territory, the people and all the biological life that goes with that situation, on the one hand, and on the other, the United States as a nation with pride and honor.
You know, quite recently the Congress passed an act against burning the flag, with all sorts of patriotic speeches, and those same congressmen are responsible directly for burning that for which the flag stands. By absolute callousness as to the care of the physical nation--the water, the air, the crops, the forest. So this is the great confusion of civilization and if we don't find some way of overcoming it, I'm afraid that 2000 AD. will see us as a non-geographical expression.
The point then is this: that civilized man has developed the incredible technique of civilization, of words which represent things and events, of numbers which represent atoms and arrangements of physical nature, of social institutions, laws states, family patterns, and so on. And in these terms, he represents the physical world in the same way as the menu represents dinner. But he has been so fascinated by the power of this symbolic way of looking at things, that he very easily confuses it with what it represents and so has a tendency to eat the menu instead of dinner.
Money Isn't Wealth
This is precisely the disease from which those congressmen who are irate about burning the flag are suffering from. But this disease assumes much more serious forms, and the one I want to talk about first as the major obstacle to the survival of the territory of the United States in the year 2000 may be symbolized by the confusion of money with wealth.
You remember, don't you, the great depression. Suddenly the whole country was in a state of poverty for the reason that there was what they call a financial collapse.
There was no diminution of our natural resources. There was no diminution of our physical strength, of our intelligence. But suddenly, almost overnight, we had an economic depression: incredible poverty and suffering because of a financial slump.
If you came to work one day and they said to you, "You are going to build a house." And they said to you, "Sorry, baby, but we can't build a house today. We haven't got any inches." "What do you mean we haven't got any inches? Haven't we got wood? Haven't we got lumber?" "Oh, no, no we don't mean inches of wood or inches of lumber, we got tape measures. Oh, no, not tape measures. Just inches. There's no more inches to go around."
And that's exactly what happened in the depression. Based on the fallacy that money is wealth or that money is real. Because money is, in a sense, a reality, but a reality of exactly the same order as six inches, hours, or lines of longitude. It is a measurement of wealth, but it is confused with wealth. And this is the main thing which is blotting the proper expansion of the technological genius of our time.
There is no question that within a relatively short time, we have the technical capacity to wipe poverty off the face of the earth. It isn't a question of the old socialist program of robbing the rich to pay the poor. All that kind of thinking is entirely obsolete. It is a question of realizing that we are now, in 1968, long, long beyond the age of scarcity in which we cannot provide adequate and more than adequate necessities and luxuries for every human being on this planet. It is technically possible.
The amount we have spent upon warfare collectively since 1914 could have given every human being on earth a comfortable, independent income. And the amount we are spending daily on the war in Viet Nam could abolish the problems of almost all underdeveloped nations in the world. But the confusion is when we suggest the very idea that money doesn't matter. People feel deeply insecure.
And if we should go further than that and suggest such outrageous ideas that in the year 2000 AD there will no longer be taxation, that all utilities will be free, and that every citizen instead of having to pay taxes will receive from the government a guaranteed basic income, people say, "Where's the money gonna come from?" As if money was something that came from somewhere in the same way as iron or hydroelectric power or lumber or just plain anything.
Money doesn't come from anywhere and never did. Money is an invention, in the same way that inches, and hours, and clocks, and rulers are inventions! Money is a measure of wealth. Now if we define wealth as consisting of a sum of three things: wealth is firstly energy, secondly technical intelligence, and thirdly raw materials. Those three things.
When, for example, people think that gold is wealth and use gold for money, gold being used for money becomes immediately useless for anything else. It is locked up in just plain ingots doing nothing in banks and fortresses and is of no material value whatsoever.
But the trouble is that we who pride ourselves on being materialistically minded people and are sometimes even ashamed of ourselves for being that are not materialists in any sense whatsoever. We are high abstractionists. We are concerned with money, with status, with what we are called, what people say about us, with this whole mess of verbiage, and are very badly related indeed to any kind of physical, natural reality. Therefore, we have simply to get over...
You see, I'm simply a philosopher. I'm not a very highly informed fact man about matters economical and political but I go down to basic principles, and therefore come with a certain naiveté and innocence like the child in Hans Christian Andersen's tale of the Emperor's New Clothes that the emperor was naked. And I see in astonishment in this kind of childish way that people really think that money is necessary.
They don't understand the following simple principles. If you create a technology and the purpose of that technology is to increase our supply of goods and services and to make it unnecessary for anybody to perform drudgery, then of course, you're getting rid of work. So we have the amazing idiocy to penalize getting rid of work as something called unemployment, to be on the lower social status in which you crawl into a labor office and regretfully receive a dole. Because, you see, money is just a convenience to get rid of barter so that you wouldn't have to go down to the market with a basket of eggs in order to exchange it for a piece of meat.
But if you have nothing to barter with because the machines are doing it instead of you, then the people obviously have to credit themselves for the work done on their behalf by the machine. If they do not do so the manufacturer will not be able to sell his product. Then what must he do?
He invents instead-wars and all sorts of disturbances so that the people will be persuaded to fork out taxes and the government will be persuaded to over-extend the national debt, which is merely a method of issuing credit in order that the thing may go on. It is not necessary to invent wars; it is only necessary to invent money.
But the difficulty is, with our present psychology of money, that the moment there would be a guaranteed national income, and everybody would be given $10,000 a year as a mere starter, whatever else they may acquire by various enterprises, prices would go sky high. The so-called 'catch.' The new money in circulation. The result of that would be that you would be a pauper on $10,000 a year. Because people do not realize that when you put up prices in order to catch an extra flow of money that the money you are getting by this method is increasingly less valuable. And, therefore, you are doing nothing at all. You are simply going around in a vicious circle. And so we have a situation: when profits go up the unions say, "More wages, please."
O.K. more wages. Then what happens? The prices go up. And then the manufacturer thinks he's gaining something. He isn't gaining anything at all because it costs him more for everything he has. So, you see, the obsession of making money is a thing from which, if we're going to survive at all, a thing form which we must be delivered. Because, if you substitute for the idea of money the sensuous experience of real material wealth, you will very quickly realize that you cannot drive three cars at once, nor live in six houses at once, nor eat five breakfasts simultaneously, that there is simply a physical limit to your consumption of the most luxurious wealth imaginable.
Enjoy Luxury
The point is that everybody is going to have this. Without limit. Because it is technically possible. Therefore, a very curious thing is occurring that it is becoming an entire reversal of the Protestant ethic which was, of course, that human energies cannot be trusted unless most of them are absorbed in hard work, bringing out products. If we are dead tired when we come home from that then the devil finds work for the hands to do. And there will be pleasure-seeking and orgies and all the perversions which flow therefrom, until finally we become weak and sickly, and a prey to our enemies, and fall apart.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Q: Could you comment on where you think the internal revolution of psychedelic drugs is taking us.
WATTS: I think the psychedelic drug problem is in a very primitive condition, both as to the sophistication of the chemicals in question, the predictability of their effects, and the way in which they are used. They are instruments of extremely high potency, and the way we are using them at the present time is as if we forbade children to play with extremely dangerous automobiles, but there were enormous clubs scattered all over the country for doing just exactly that without any supervision whatsoever and without any particular wisdom. The usual way the United States deals with difficult problems is on the principle of the ostrich which is to pretend that they do not exist. I think we have in this dimension what people have often called an exploration of inner space which is quite as important potentially as any other exploration that man has made. Instead of throwing up our hands about it in horror, or going overboard for it with unbridled enthusiasm. It's one of those things which we should take, not seriously, but sincerely. And really work at it.
Q: Have you read Report from Iron Mountain, and if so what is your answer to its main thesis, the necessity and inevitability of war?
WATTS: Well, I haven't read this particular book. But when you speak of war as a necessity, I think that's just one of those things that we used to talk about, that it was really very necessary for women to bear children in agony. It was sort of one of those things, the sort of masochism, we feel condemned to these procedures. As a matter of fact, we can change them overnight. You just have to get out of your head the idea that this is just a law of nature, that you have to be aggressive in a certain way. A lot of that is a kind of role playing. When you want to cure people of certain habits, you can do so very quickly by getting them to change their conception of their personality, and that means it's based on a thorough questioning of what your basic assumptions are about: who you are and what is human nature. There is no fixed quantity for human nature. It's and extremely malleable thing. Only people who don't want to change very much always argue that human nature is unchangeable.
Q: Today spiritual thought and experience are nearly unheard of in the Christian world. What are the possibilities for the development of spiritual man in the future? And, if the spirituality develops, what form might it take?
WATTS: I don't like the word "spirituality: either because it implies a dimension of life which is exclusive of or in some way outside of our sensory input. But I do feel that it goes beyond the domain of the interpersonal. That's certainly included in it, but the great wonder that man has is not merely in the domain of his relationship to other people, but his curious situation in this extraordinary cosmos in which the more he knows about astronomy the more startling the whole thing is. The more he knows about physics...but if we find it relatively easy to understand our human situation and our relations with humans, but what on earth are we doing in this extraordinary fireworks display called the universe? And the development of a feeling of an increasing at-homeness in this thing may lead us to conceive it less as a thing, a contraption, a system, and more as what Carl Rogers calls personal. But not is the sense of something with whiskers on, you know, a personal God, but a something alive like an organism instead of something dead like a mechanism.
Copyright © 1995 Joan Watts Tabernik & Anne Watts
