Eric Hoffer, in his fourth book, The Temper Of Our Time, in Chapter 2
(Automation, Leisure, and The Masses), which runs from Page 21
through Page 46, warns that endless leisure and unearned affluence,
would destroy the masses, or members of the elite for that matter.
Hoffer, like Jordan Peterson, suggests that people find meaning,
work, satisfaction, identity and perhaps self-esteem by being
skilled, by doing, as an adult, a fair day’s work for a fair day’s
pay. Natural human self-discontent will fester in the heart and soul
of each drone getting paid without working, festering until the
masses revolt or explode as frustrated true believers, just to have a
reason, however fake and fantastic, just to justify getting up in the
morning.
I will type out Hoffer’s whole second chapter below and comment on
it. Elon Musk recently boasted that with AI robots coming on line in
a few years, there will be no jobs for people, that people will be
rich, unemployed and guaranteed an income, without lifting a finger.
I cannot imagine a worse scenario for each American to endure. We all
must work going forward, including doing some manual labor, though
robots can do it faster, better and quicker. A leisured,
pensioned-off population will be populated by individuals with no
self-esteem at all, and there is no more effective way to grow
revolution, lawlessness and wickedness in America than by denying
people the right and responsibility to work for their daily bread.
Here is Hoffer (H after this): “The spectacular progress of
mechanization on the San Francisco water front in 1963 filled me with
foreboding. * (*This chapter originally appeared in the New York
Times Magazine, October 24, 1965.) It seemed to me that in almost no
time the people I had lived and worked with all my life would become
unneeded and unwanted. A leading manufacturer of automation equipment
told a Congressional committee that already in 1963 automation was
eliminating 40,000 jobs a week. Time magazine put the figure at
50,000. At the same time, in 1963, 2.5 million young people entered
the labor market. It was estimated that 26 million young people would
enter the labor market in the 1960s. Our economy had to create about
5 million new jobs a year in order to keep standing where it was,
without touching the chronic pool of 5 million unemployed.
The assumption that once the economy started to grow at a
satisfactory rate it would absorb most of the unemployed seemed
fallacious. Eighty percent of the money spent on growth is spend on
labor-saving devices. In 1963, it took a $30,000 increase in the
gross national product to create one job. In 1953 it took $12,000; in
1973 it may take $75,000. No one expected our economy to grow faster
tan 5 percent a year. With a gross national product of $600 billion,
5 percent comes to $30 billion which creates only 1 million jobs. It
did not seem, therefore, too farfetched to assume that in a matter of
decades our cities would stand packed with masses of superfluous
humanity. Now, at one point in history, God and priests seemed to
become superfluous, yet the world went on as before. Then again the
aristocrats became superfluous and hardly anyone noticed their exit.
In Russia where they have capitalism without capitalists, yet things
get done somehow. But when the masses become superfluous it means
humanity becomes superfluous, and this is something that staggers the
mind.”
My response: Hoffer wrote this prophetic article in 1963, and 42
years after his death, here we are discussing how AI and robots
potentially could take over all human jobs, and to borrow his phrase,
if the masses become superfluous, humanity becomes superfluous.
Humans must work and be productive, feel worthy and contributing, or
the blow to their self-esteem will make them so passionate,
frustrated and desperate, that they will invent or join some
explosive mass movement just to find something to do, something to
believe in and to identify with.
H: “In 1966 it is obvious that the great fear which possessed me in
1963 is not justified.”
My response: We must find people jobs so they can work and not
destabilize society in the near future as AI and able, smart robots
increasingly take jobs that humans used to do, and the robots will do
them better than faster. We do not want Hoffer’s fear from his day
to become a nightmare reality in 2039.
H: “There has recently been a sharp drop in the number of
unemployed, and even without a Vietnam emergency the consequences of
automation are not likely to be as unprecedented and immediate as I
had imagined. Some experts are now predicting that ‘Help Wanted’
signs will soon be everywhere in evidence and unemployment down to
the level of 2 percent. Nevertheless, the thoughts and musings set
off by the doom-around-the-corner mood of 1963 have a validity of
their own and are not affected by the course automation may take in
the foreseeable future.
The thing that worried me about the prospective 20 to 39 million
unemployed was not that they would starve I assumed that the
superfluous would be given the wherewithal for a good living, even
enough to buy things and go fishing. What worried me was the prospect
of a skilled and highly competent population living off the fat of
the land without a sense of usefulness and worth. There is nothing
more explosive than a skilled population condemned to inaction. Such
a population is likely to become a hotbed of extremism and
intolerance, and be receptive to any proselytizing ideology, however
absurd and vicious, which promises vast action. In pre-Hitlerian
Germany a population that knew itself admirably equipped for action
was rusting away in idleness, and gave its allegiance to a Nazi party
which offered unlimited opportunities for action.”
My response: This scary paragraph deserves to be reread: adults need
to work and be employed.
H: “In this country, even the inaction due to retirement often
becomes explosive. In Southern California, where retired farmers,
shopkeepers, business executives, generals, and admirals abound, we
have been treated to a madhouse of extremist cults, utopias, and
movements. My feeling is that an energetic, skilled population
deprived of a sense of usefulness would be an ideal setup for an
American Hitler.
Yet it is part of the fantastic quality of human nature that the
thwarted desire for action which may generate extremism and
intolerance may also be released in a flow of creative energies.
There are examples from every era illustrating this fact, and none
more striking than the conditions which attended the first appearance
of written literature in the ancient civilizations. We are often told
that the invention of writing in the Middle East about 3000 B.C.
marked an epoch in man’s career because it revolutionized the
transmission of knowledge and ideas. Actually, for many centuries
after its invention writing was used solely to keep track of the
intake and outgo of treasuries and warehouses. Writing was not
invented to write books but to keep books. The earliest examples we
have of writing are invoices and lists of articles. The scribe who
practiced the craft of writing was a civil servant—a clerk and
book-keeper. Literature was the domain of bards and storytellers who
no more thought of writing down their stock in trade than other
craftsman would the secrets of their trade. Century after century the
scribe kept keeping records He felt smug in his bureaucratic niche,
had no grievances and dreamed no dreams. Then, in every civilization,
at some point, the scribe made his appearance as a ‘writer.’ When
you try to find out what it was that started the scribe ‘writing,’
the answer in every case is the same: the scribe began to write when
he became unemployed.
In Egypt it happened toward the end of the third millennium B.C.
during the breakdown of the Old Kingdom—the first catastrophic
breakdown of civilization. The vast bureaucratic apparatus fell
apart, and the scribe who had been so secure in his bureaucratic
berth found himself suddenly abandoned, without status and without
anything to do. We can hear an echo of the scribe’s despair in two
of the earliest fragments of Egyptian literature—’The
Lamentations’ of the former treasury official Ipuwer, and the
former scribe Neferrohu. You can see how the scribe, deprived of his
official identity, reaches out for a new identity—that of a sage,
prophet, or national spokesman—and tries to shine again in the use
of his skill with pen and ink by describing in sonorous phrases the
evils which have befallen the land. We read how Neferrohu, ‘a
scribe whose cunning fingers stretched out his hand to the box of
writing material and took him a scroll and pen-and-ink case, and then
he put in writing.’ He wrote: ‘Up my heart that thou may bewail
this land whence thou art sprung . . . The whole land hath perished,
there is naught left, and the black of the nail surviveth not what
should be there.’
In Sumer the oldest literary remains are from around 2000 B.C., after
the fall of the Third Dynasty of Ur, ‘the most glorious age of
Sumer.’ During the great age the scribes had other things to do.
Sir Leonard Woolley expresses his surprise that the glorious Third
Dynasty ‘left virtually no trace of any literary record.’ It was
only when the great age was brought to its end by the invading
Amorites and Elamites that the Sumerian scribes ‘took it in had to
record the glories of the great days that had passed away.’
In Palestine written literature starts after the breakdown of the
centralized Solomonic kingdom. The Phoenician traders next door had
around 1000 B.C. perfected the simplified alphabet from the
cumbersome picture writing of the Egyptians, and by adopting the new
easy writing Solomon could turn a mass of illiterate Hebrews into
proficient clerks to staff his vast bureaucracy. Even Amos, a
sheep-herder from the village of Tekoa, could become a privileged
clerk. And then Solomon dies and the whole thing falls apart. The
army of new scribes find themselves suddenly unemployed. Amos had to
go back to his village and herd sheep again. It is not difficult to
imagine his frustration and chagrin. You can see him back in Tekoa
with his pen, inkstand, and papyrus roll declaiming on the evil which
have befallen the land, and lashing out at greedy traders and the
corrupt officials and priests. He surrounds himself with a band of
disciples whom he teaches to write, and who take down every word he
says. Thus Amos establishes one of the most glorious literary
traditions.
In Greece written literature makes its appearance after the breakdown
of the highly bureaucratized Mycenaen civilization. Here, too, the
introduction of the Phoenician alphabet increased the number of
potential scribes who saw it as their birthright to regulate society
yet could find no adequate employment. Hesiod, a contemporary of
Amos, mastered the art of writing yet had to stay on the farm. He,
too, was gripped with the impulse to exhort and instruct his fellow
men, and to start writing.
In China written literature dates from the 6th century
B.C., the chaotic period of ‘the contending states’ which
followed the dissolution of the Chou Empire, The country was full of
roaming bands of unemployed scribes who went about arguing,
philosophizing, intriguing and writing. Confucius was one of them.
The hankering after a busy, purposeful life forced the energies of
the disinherited scribes into creative channels.”
My response: Hoffer is convincing that unemployed intellectuals turn
to writing and agitating, As a Mavellonialist, it would be my
recommendation that adults require purposeful, busy lives, and, as
individuators, they should work for their daily bread as well as
pursue their creative passion. This approach if common would
stabilize a society and yet allow it to reap the rewards of so many
thousands or millions of individuators creatively inventing all the
time.
H: “Other examples, remote and recent, come to mind of the
connection between forced inaction and the release of creative
energies. Thucydides was a passionate general. He did not want to be
a writer; he wanted to command men in battle. But after losing a
battle, he was exiled, and had to eat his heart out watching other
generals fight the war. So he composed The Peloponnesian War, one of
the finest histories ever written. Machiavelli was a born schemer.
His ardent desire was to pull strings, negotiate, intrigue, caucus,
go on missions, and so on. But he lost his job as a minor diplomat
and had to go back to his native village, where he spent his days
gossiping and playing cards in the village inn. In the evening he
returned to his house, took off his muddy clothes, put on a toga, and
sat down to write The Prince and Discourses on Livy.
One more example. During the reign of Louis XIV the French
aristocracy produced a crop of remarkable writers: de Retz, Hamilton,
Saint-Simon, La Rochefoucald. If you asked why it happened in France
and not in other countries, the answer is again—unemployment. While
the aristocracies of England, Spain, Italy, and Germany were managing
affairs, amassing fortunes, fighting wars, and even making and
unmaking kings, the French aristocrats were taken off their estates,
pulled out of the army, and brought to Versailles, where all they
could do was watch each other and be bored to death.”
My response: It is Hoffer’s conclusion that talented, affluent,
unemployed elites turn to creativity to find something to do, to find
a reason to live. My extension of this wise realization is that all
people are talented, and that, be they employed, unemployed, average
in talent or exceptionally gifted, they should self-realize and work
for their daily bread at the same time.
H: “Enough has been said to show that a loss of a sense of
usefulness and a passionate desire for impressive action may release
a creative flow in a sorts of people—in sheepherders, farmers,
officials, generals, politicians, aristocrats, and run-of-the mill
clerks. It goes without saying that in addition to a thwarted desire
for action there must be talent and a degree of expertise. People who
have nothing to say or have no idea how to say it when they have
something to say will not start writing no matter how optimal the
conditions. La Rochefoucald obviously had talent and, what is equally
important, a taste for a good sentence. The reign of Louis XIV has
been called ‘a despotism tempered by epigram,’ and La
Rochefoucald also had the salons in which expression was practiced as
a fine art. We can, therefore, expect unemployment to release a
creative flow in the masses only if we assume that masses in America
are not less endowed with genius than other segments of the
population,”
My response: Unemployment and leisure time can trigger a release of
creative flow in the masses so talented that they all can individuate
and should, be they working or unemployed, while insisting that they
want to work and will work, even if they invent their own jobs and
business-start-ups.
H: “and that it is possible to bring about a diffusion of expertise
in mechanics and sports. I’ve always had a feeling that the people
I live and work with are lumpy with talent. The cliché that talent
is rare is not founded on fact.”
My response: Hoffer’s hunch that the masses are laden with and are
lumpy with talent is one of his most original, significant and
reassuring insights. Implicit in this insights is the presupposition
that all people are lumpy with talent, that all people are more or
less created with deep, foundational talent, and that they are more
or less created equal, and the talented masses can do apiece most
anything if they realized their abilities and actualized them.
H: “All that we know is that there are short periods in history
when genius springs up all over the landscape, and long periods of
mediocrity and inertness. In the small city of Athens within the
space of fifty years there sprang up a whole crop of geniuses”
My response: 1,000 geniuses exist in Park River, North Dakota, if
they but believed in themselves, and granted themselves the
opportunity to show and demonstrate to the world what they are
capable of. This same miracle could happen in rural Somalia or in
some mountain hamlet in Afghanistan.
H: “—Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Phidias, Pericles,
Socrates, Thucydides, Aristophanes. These people did not come from
heaven. Something similar happened in Florence at the time of the
Renaissance, in the Netherlands between 1400 and 1700 during the
great period of the Dutch-Flemish painting, and in Elizabethan
England What we know with certainty is not that talent and genius are
rare exceptions but that all through history talent and genius have
gone to waste on a vast scale.”
My response: The human nature that is evil more than good is what
fuels this tragic, historical waste of human talent and genius on a
vast scale. The altruistic and groupist instincts, worsened by social
ethos of negative reinforcement, tempt and nudge humans to be evil,
destructive and chaotic, not only from a pure, unleashed desire to
destroy and kill, but more deadly if diluted is the common
suppression of personal expression of personal creative potential,
but rewarding the masses to nonindividuate and group live their lives
of quiet desperation and mediocrity.
H: “Stalin liquidated the most intelligent, cultivated, and gifted
segment of the Russian population and made of Russia a nation of
lesser mujicks, yet no one will maintain that Russia is at present
less endowed with talent than it was before the revolution. I would
not worry, therefore, whether the American masses have talents worth
realizing. The possibility of a mass renaissance hinges thus on the
feasibility of a mass diffusion of cultural expertise.”
My response: That AI and smart robots, will supplant, perhaps
enslave, and push aside their human creators, by making us
marginalized and helpless or perhaps exterminated by them, is a
realistic fear; it may be unstoppable, but, if Mavellonialist
principles could provide a source and mechanism for a mass diffusion
of cultural expertise among the masses here and elsewhere, an armed
and militant American citizenry of 200 million anarchist
individuating supercitizens, each one of the masses could do whatever
a smart robot could do, and perhaps better and faster. Only as
supercitizens will humans compete victoriously with AI and its
machines and electronic race in the future.
H: “My hunch is that such a diffusion could not be brought about
radical chances in our way of life.”
My response: I think there was a typo in this sentence, that Hoffer
referred to radical changes not radical chances.
H: “But of that later.
We know of one instance in the past where the masses entered the
field of cultural creativeness as participants. We are told that
Florence at the time of the Renaissance had more artists than
citizens. Where did these artists come from? They were for the most
part sons of shopkeepers, artisans, peasants, and petty officials.
Giotto and Andrea del Castagno were shepherding boys, Ghirlandajo was
the son of a goldsmith. Andrea del Sarto the son of a tailor,
Donatello the son of a wood carder. Most of the artists served their
apprenticeship with artisans and craftsmen. The art honored in
Florence was a trade, and the artists were treated as artisans.”
My response: I just discovered a realization that I had not capture
on previous readings” Hoffer is suggesting that if common young
people, girls or boys, were allowed to be individuating and
hyper-creative, that they could make a living at it, not just do it
as an evening avocation, if their art-loving public audience would
financially support them so they could make a living at their
creative craft.
H: “They were dressed like artisans in long tunic with leather
belts, and cloaks that came halfway down the leg. When Veronese was
asked about his profession he answered: ‘I am a laborer’ (Sono
lavoratore). The sixteenth century historian Bendetto Varchi
expressed his surprise that the Florentines who had been accustomed
from childhood to carry heavy bales of wool and baskets of silk, and
who spent all day and a large part of the night glued to their looms,
should harbor so great a spirit and such high and noble thoughts.”
My response: Hoffer indicates two other discoveries here: That as the
apprentices of burghers, farmers, laborers and craftsman, these young
Florentines knew how to discipline the self and to push the self to
work hard to earn a living, and, that, when that character formation
process is undertaken and coupled with a culture of individuating in
which a young adult in the world of commerce and business is imbued
with great spirit and high and noble thoughts, she can create
wondrously most anything she puts her mind to accomplishing.
H: “Everyone in Florence seemed to know something about the
procedures and techniques o the arts, and could judge whatever work
was in progress. There was also a sort of spotting system. Just as in
this country there is little chance that if a boy in a back lot
throws a ball with speed and deftness the performance will not go
unnoticed, so in Florence there were discerning eyes watching the
young for marks of talent. When a sheepherding boy picked up a piece
of charcoal from the pavement and started to draw on the wall there
was someone who saw it and asked the boy whether he would like to
draw and paint, and in this way Andrea del Castagno became a painter.
It was, it is true, all on a small scale. But a big country like ours
is after all made up of a large number of small social units.:’’
My response: This kind of social paradise for the creative masses
must be fostered by the masses who actually are running things in
their polity or canton; elites will never consciously liberate the
masses to run their own affairs in complete liberty to self-realize
as they will.
H: “Where the development of talent is concerned we are still at
the food-gathering stage. We do not know how to grow it. Up to now in
this country when one of the masses starts to write, paint, etc., it
is because he happens to bump into the right accident. In my case the
right accident came in the 1930s. I had the habit of reading from
childhood, but very little schooling. I spent half of my adult life
as a migratory worker and the other half as a longshoreman. The
Hitler decade started me thinking, but there is an enormous distance
between thinking and the act of writing. I had to acquire a taste for
a good sentence—taste it in the way a child tastes candy—before I
stumbled into writing. Here is how it happened. Late in 1936 I was on
my way to do some placer mining near Nevada City, and I had a hunch
that I would get snowbound. I had to get me something to read,
something that would last me for a long time. So I stopped in San
Francisco to get a thick book. I did not really care what the book
was about—history, theology,. mathematics, farming, anything, so
long as it was thick, had small print and no pictures. There was at
that time a large second-hand bookstore on Market Street called
Lieberman’s and I went there to buy my book. I soon found one. It
had about a thousand pages of small print and no pictures. The price
was one dollar. The title page said these were The Essays of Michel
de Montaigne. I knew what essays were but I did not know Montaigne
from Adam. I put the book in my knapsack and caught the ferry to
Sausalito.
Sure enough, I got snowbound. I read the book three times until I
knew it almost by heart. When I got back to the San Joaquin Valley I
could not open my mouth without quoting Montaigne, and the fellows
liked it. It got so whenever there was an argument about
anything—women, money, animals, food, death—they would ask: ‘What
does Montaigne say?”’ Out came the book and I would find the
right passage. I am quite sure even now there must be a number of
migrant workers up and down the San Joaquin Valley still quoting
Montaigne. I ought to add that the Montaigne edition I had was the
John Florio translation. The spelling was modern, but the style
seventeenth century—the style of the King James Bible and of
Bacon’s Essays. The sentences have hooks in them that stick in the
mind; they make platitudes seem as if they are new. Montaigne was not
above anyone’s head. Once in a workers’ barrack near Stockton,
the man in the next bunk picked up my Montaigne and read it for an
hour or so. When he returned it he said: ‘Anyone can write a book
like this.’
The attempt to realize the potentialities of the masses may seem
visionary and extravagant, yet it is eminently practical when judged
by the criterion of social efficiency. For the efficiency of a
society should be gauged not only by how effectively it utilizes its
natural resources but by what it does with its human resources.
Indeed, the utilization of natural resources can be deemed efficient
only when it serves as a means for the realization of the
intellectual, artistic, and manipulative capacities inherent in the
population. It is evident, therefore, that if we are to awaken and
cultivate the talents dormant in a whole population we must change
our conceptions of what is efficient, useful, practical, wasteful,
and so on. Up to now in this country we are warned not to waste our
time but we are brought up to waste our lives.”
My response: Yes, we waste our lives and no expert protests.
H: “Does this mean we have to eliminate or radically change our
free enterprise system? Not at all. On the contrary, the state of
affairs we are striving for might give more leeway to the people who
operate and benefit from the present system. For we shall free them
from responsibility for the unneeded and unwanted millions who will
remove themselves to a place where they can experiment with a new way
of life. In other words, we recommend here two social systems
existing side by side, not in competition and strife but in amity and
mutuality, and with absolute freedom of movement from one to the
other.
Usually when we think of a substitute for our present system, the
choices which offer themselves are singly or in combination: society
as a church, society as an army, society as a factory, society as a
prison, and society as a school.”
My response: Hoffer means well but I do not think it is workable or
necessary to offer one county as a work county and the county next to
it as a school for adults to individuate. I think we can let society
remain a motley blend, comprised of work and business counties but
the adults, the majority of them, work, run businesses, raise
families, but individuate in the evening, part-time, on the side or
at special libraries or salons common and everywhere in their town,
village or rural area.
H: “For our purposes the choice must be the last named--society as
a school. I am not unmindful of the fact that so far, except in
science and philosophy, schools have not been a forcing house of
talent. The best of our literature, painting, sculpture, music, etc.
has not come out of schools.”
My response: This is as I predict, that schools are groupist
institution for breaking students into compliant, sleepy, conformist,
group-oriented nonindividuators; it works and creativity, originality
and intellectual depth are not products of public schools.
H: “It is also true that as we look around us we find that the most
oppressive and ruthless ruling classes in our present world have a
large number of former schoolteachers. This is true of the Communist
countries, of the new nations in Asia and Africa, and of the
government by professors in Portugal. But we shall have to take the
risk and provide against tyranny by schoolmasters,
I would start with a pilot state made up of a slice of northern
California and a slice of souther Oregon, and run by the University
of California. I would call it the state of the unemployed, and
anyone crossing into it would automatically become a student. The
state would be divided up into a small number of school districts,
each district charged with the realization and cultivation of its
natural and human resources. Production of the necessities of life
would be wholly automated since the main purpose of life would be for
people to learn and grow.”
My response: Hoffer means well, but people need to work with their
hands, and do manual labor, and do technical, physical labor, as well
as learn and grow creatively and intellectual prowess. Where the
masses live like a pampered elite of old, doing no manual labor, no
work drudgery, these drones end up without self-esteem, without
function, without identity, and that leads to the rise of mass
movements, holy causes, and a legion of robot servants and slaves
doing all of the physical labor. How long before the slaves revolt
and overthrow their task-mistresses and taskmasters?
H: “I said that the school districts would be small, for I am
convinced that the unfolding of human capacities requires a social
unit in which people of different interests, skills and tastes know
each other, emulate, antagonize, and spur each other.”
My response: It is likely that smaller, even rural or semi--rural
school districts or cantons as I prefer to call them, might be the
optimal size for people maximally enjoying and benefitting from
associating with each other while most or all maverize.
H: “The absolute freedom of movement from one system to the other
and from one district to the other will result in a continued sorting
out of people, so that eventually each system and each district will
be operated by its most ardent adherents.
I am convinced that the coexistence of two social systems in one
country would enhance our sense of freedom. For freedom is predicated
on the presence of alternatives in the economic, cultural, and
political fields.”
My response: I agree with Hoffer that freedom is predicated on the
presence of alternatives, but I suggest that these choices be
available to each maverizing adult in her personal life, as she
chooses to marry, have babies, stay single, have a career and write
new math theorems or invents a new artificial language of formal
logic.
H: “Even in the absence of tyranny freedom becomes meaningless
where there is abject poverty, political inertness, and cultural
sameness. And certainly no alternative can be as productive of a
sense of freedom as the alternative of two different social systems.”
My response: If egoist ethics and individuating supercitizenship were
to become the ethos of the American masses, the political inertness,
abject poverty and cultural sameness would automatically be much
reduced, thus rendering the quantity and quality freedom at work in
America to remain meaningful and enjoyable.
H: “Finally it is particularly fitting if the new states of the
unemployed were to be created in parts of the country that have been
depleted and ravaged—where forests have been destroyed, mines
worked out, the soil exhausted. The simultaneous reclamation of
natural and human resources would add zest and a higher congruity to
the new societies.”
My response: The brilliant Hoffer’s intuition that the simultaneous
reclamation of natural, human—and I add urban settings—would
restore and galvanize the individuator doings the work, as well as
nature and the cites will be rejuvenated. It might even grow the
economy, all this creative and practical activity.
H: “To sum up: The business of a society with an automated economy
can no longer be business. The choice will be between a Great Society
and no society at all; between a society preoccupied with the
realization and cultivation of its human resources and a society in
the grip of chaos.”
My response: Right on, Mr. Hoffer.
H: “The great fear which possessed me in 1963 made me do things I
never dreamed of doing. After years of hardly ever sticking my nose
outside the waterfront I found myself running around, shooting my
mouth off, telling people of a turning point ahead as fateful as any
since the origin of society, and warning them that woe betides a
society that reaches such a turning point and does not turn. I
noticed, as the months went by, how myths and legends came floating
into my mind. It was some time before I realized that the myths
dovetailed into a pattern, that they were telling a coherent story—a
version of automation. Here it is.
When God made the world He immediately automated it, and there was
nothing left for Him to do. So in His boredom He began to tinker and
experiment. Man was a runaway experiment. It was in a mood of divine
recklessness that God created man. ‘In the image of God He created
him,’ and it was a foregone conclusion that a creature thus made
would try to emulate and surpass his creator. And indeed, no sooner
did God create man than He was filled with misgivings and suspicions.
He could not take His eyes off his last and strangest creation.”
My response: It tickles me mightily that Hoffer the atheist is such a
rich metaphysician and mythologist. It seems likely that other
creatures which De created are robots (All have consciousness and a
smidgen of free will but mostly are other-determined by their genetic
code.), but humans, though more robot than not, have the power of
reasoning, free will and the divine spark, which enables them to
choose to be God’s partners and servants in growing love, structure
and cosmos in the universe.
Humans as non-robots can make things worse and this upsets God
mightily, but, if they get it right, they can extend the reach of
heaven farther, wiser and deeper than instinct-driven creatures in
the natural world, and God was willing to take a risk in turning
humans loose on the world.
Humans can compete with God and seek to supplant God but that is
unwise and likely doomed to failure. It is better and safer to
revere, to serve and to love God while developing our powers of
reason, science, skills and advanced technology.
H: “I can see Jehovah leaning over a bank of clouds contemplating
the strange creature as it puttered about under the trees in the
garden of Eden, wondering what was going on in the creature’s
head—what thoughts, what dreams, what plans, and what plots. The
early chapters of Genesis make it plain that God was worried and took
no chances. The moment man ate from the tree of knowledge God had his
worst fears confirmed. He drove man out of Eden and curse him for
good measure.”
My response: I think our altruistic ethics makes us read this
backwards. The moment Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge,
which rational, free-willing, intellectually curious sentient beings
would find irresistible—a human response which God their creator
would know in advance of warning them not to eat of the tree of
knowledge. God did not curse them for getting knowledge and thus
beginning their long drive to get smarter and more technologically
and scientifically powerful than God, so that they could overthrow
him and become trans-humanistic gods themselves.
God ejected them from the Garden of Eden where all beings were good
robots, because they now had rational consciousness, free will and
primitive but actual knowledge and science, so they no longer
belonged in or could live in the Garden of Eden. They were tossed out
into the world of reality by God, not as a curse but as a gift and
blessing, a tough-love blessing to be sure, but as rational,
consciousness free-willing smart beings, they were called to and had
a chance to be holy and virtuous, and to individuate each and
everyone one of them, thus serving God well, making the world a
better place, and earning, fi they did well by God, a place in heave,
perhaps for eternity, but at least for a long time. God turned humans
loose to become De’s obedient and reverent living angels and junior
partners, not rivals to be slapped down, cursed and made to suffer
unnecessarily.
H: “But you do not stop a conspirator from conspiring by exiling
him. I can see Adam get up from the dust after he had been bounced
out, shake his fist at the closed gates of Eden and the watching
angels, and mutter, ‘I will return,’ Though condemned to wrestle
with a cursed earth for his bread and fight off thistles and thorns,
man resolved in the depths of his soul to become indeed a creator—to
create a man-made world that would straddle and tame God’s
creation. Thus all through the millennia of man’s existence the
vying with God has been a leading motif of his strivings and efforts.
Much of the time the motif is drowned out by the counterpoint of
daily life, but it is clear and unmistakable in times of great
venturesomeness. In the fabulous Late Neolithic ‘when man begin to
multiply upon the face of the earth,’ and in a burst of
creativeness invented the wheel, sail, plow, brick-making,
metallurgy, and other momentous devices, they also set out to build
‘a tower whose top may reach unto heaven.’ They said they were
building the tower for the glory of it, to ‘make us a name,’ but
God knew better. ‘Behold,’ he said to His retinue of angels,
‘this they begin to do, and now nothing will be unrestrained from
them, which they have imagined to do.’ So he confounded their
language and scattered them abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
It was only six thousand years later that the modern Occident picked
up where the builders of the Tower of Babel left off.
It was the machine age that really launched the man-made creation.
The machine was man’s way of breathing will and thought into
inanimate matter. Unfortunately the second creation did not quite
come off. Unlike God, man cannot immediately automate his man-made
world.”
My response: I have two reactions: First, with the machine age
culminating with our revolution if smart, mobile robots and powerful
AI computers, we finally will be able to automate entirely the
man-made world, a feat done previous only by the Light Couple as
creators of the natural world. It may seem that the world of humans,
unnatural computers, cities and technology rivals God and is evil,
but I believe that it is an imperfect attempt to emulate God, and
that the machine age can be good more than not and not rival the
natural world or supernatural world, but the human, artificial world
when good in the hands of individuators need not and should not rival
with or destroy or attempt to destroy or supplant nature, God or
super-nature, but too augment and enrich as complementary new
provinces, territories won and converted by the children of light,
added to God’s near universal kingdom, and that is as God intended,
and God is no way threatened by healthy human achievement and
culture but orders us to do it and do it well, but to work under
God’s ancient covenants with us to live as rational living angels
running and creating and expanding God’s kingdom.
H: “He was not inventive enough. Until yesterday, the machine
remained a half-machine: it lacked the gears and filaments of will
and thought, and man had to use his fellow men as a stopgap for
inventiveness. He had to yoke men, women, and children with iron and
steam. The machine age became an echo of the fearful tale of the Bull
of Phalaris. This story tells of an Athenian artist who made a brazen
bull for the King of Phalaris. The bull was so lifelike that the
artist was seized by a desire to make the bull come alive and bellow
like a real bull. Of course he was not inventive enough to do it, but
he hit on the idea of using human beings as a stopgap. He constructed
the throat of the bull so that when a human being was placed inside
the belly and a fire lit underneath, the shrieks and groans of the
victim as they came through the specially constructed throat sounded
like the bellowing of a live bull. Even so during the last 150 years
millions of human beings were scooped off the land and shoveled into
the bellies of smoke-belching factories to make the Bull of Phalaris
roar. There was no escape for the mass of people from the ravenous
maws of factories and mines. If they crossed the ocean and came to
America the factories and mines were there waiting to receive them.
Then yesterday, almost unnoticed, the automated machine age edged
onto the stage. It was born in the laboratories of technical schools
where mathematicians and engineers were trying to duplicate the human
brain. And it was brought into the factory not to cure the disease of
work which had tortured humanity for untold generations, but to
eliminate man from the productive process.”
My response: Work is not a disease or curse but is a cure and
blessing for unbearable, personal sense of worthlessness and
purposelessness, especially if one is quite skilled, employed and
bringing home enough bacon to care well for one’s family.
Automation in 2026, using AI computers and working smart robots to
completely automatize all jobs which humans now perform is a curse
and a sickening undertaking.
H: “Power is always charged with the impulse to eliminate human
nature, the human variable, from the equation.”
My response: That is so that elites running things seek to eliminate
workers with their physical limits and demands for more pay and
better working conditions, but humans must be involved in work for
the good of the individual and the entire society.
H: “Dictators do it by terror or by the inculcation of blind faith;
the military do it by iron discipline; and the industrial masters
think they can do it by automation.”
My response: The dictator, the military and the industrial masters
wield the power of powerlessness, so they seek to eliminate human
individuality, questioning, original or independent thinking, but,
once these elites are ruled by supercitizens with their alternative,
counter-attacking power of powerfulness, these elites will have to
deal with supercitizens as employees, citizens, consumers and voters
and it is the most rewarding adaptation for elites to make—the most
trying and difficult too—but once they do, all institutions will
skyrocket in better products, service, performance and mission
completion.
H: “But the world has not fallen into the hands of the commissars,
generals, and the National Association of Manufacturers. There is a
change of climate now taking place everywhere which is unfavorable to
the exercise of absolute power. Even in the totalitarian countries
the demands of common folk are becoming determining factors in
economic, social, and political decisions. There is, therefore, a
chance that the denouement of automation might be what we want it to
be.
I shall not forget the day mechanization made its entrance on the San
Francisco waterfront. Discharging newsprint used to be one of the
hardest jobs. The rolls, some of them eight feet high and weighing
almost a ton, were landed horizontally on a platform, rolled onto
long-handled metal trucks, and then hauled away. You had to watch
your step, strain every muscle to balance the load, and be
continually on the run. Now the rolls come out upright, two at a
time, and land themselves. The clamp bridles released the rolls
automatically when they land. Then a special lift runs up, puts its
padded arms gently round the two rolls, lifts them like a feather,
backs into the dock, and stacks the roll two high when necessary. All
that first day I watched the rolls come out. All I had to do was
steady the rolls with a pat, and change a gear now and then. I said
to mysef: ‘The skirmish with God has now moved all the way back to
the gates of Eden. Jehovah and his angels with their flaming swords
are holed up in their Eden fortress, and we with our automated
machines are hammering at the gates. And right there, in the sight of
Jehovah and his angels, we shall declare null and void the ukase that
with the sweat of his face man shall eat bread.’
My response: The machine age, AI and smart robots, with their
automation of potentially all human jobs, likely could make null and
void the ukase that humans no longer have to work to earn their daily
bread but that is quite undesirable for human happiness, and is
explosively destabilizing. To repeat, AI, machinery automation and
smart robots could well lead to universal human unemployment, and
guaranteed income and endless leisure granted to all, but that is a
moral death sentence, for humans must work, physical work as well as
mental or intellectual work, or their hard-won sanity, self-esteem
and happiness will quickly erode away. We work because we must work
or starve, but we also work because we must work for life to provide
us with purpose and meaning, not just sustenance. When God threw us
out of the Garden of Eden, and condemned us to work, this ‘curse”
was actually the gift if living the lives of free willing, conscious
adults, who work for their bread and work to be contented, as
contented as humans can ever be.
H: “Certainly this mood was not shared by many of my fellow
longshoreman. They displayed an instinctive wariness as if wanting to
make sure the thing wouldn’t bite them. This despite the fact that
a contract with the employers protects us against a loss of earnings
and against layoffs. In less-protected industries the reaction is
probably more poignant.
The fact is that the mad rush of the last hundred years has left us
out of breath. We have had no time to swallow our spittle. We know
that the automated machine is here to liberate us and show us the way
back to Eden; that it will do for us what no revolution, no doctrine,
no prayer, and no promise could do. But we do not know that we have
arrived. We stand there panting, caked with sweat and dust, afraid to
realize that the seventh day of the second creation is here, and the
ultimate sabbath is spread out before us.”
My response: It certainly seems that AI and computerized, robotic
automation is actually, technologically advancing rapidly to the
point that we will be liberated from the human necessity to work at
all, but this liberation is an enticing bribe which we should not
accept. Working is a moral value, and without work we have no value,
no moral worth, and our crashing personal and collective
self-esteeming will follow. Hell on earth will have arrived. Humans
must continue to work amongst and along side of working AI and smart
robots. Humans must refute the possibility of a future as drones and
parasites leading lives of privilege and endless leisure and unearned
affluence, provided for us by an army of robot slaves and servants.
We must work remain liberated us from the enslavement of the masses
being transformed and reduced to being wards of the state living is
ease and plenty without earning it, for that sentence will only to
deliver us into the welcoming arms of Satan and Lera for that is a
devil’s bargain and social nightmare after all.
This concern about how disruptive and corrosive it is for humans who
misbehave when granted endless ease and unearned riches as wards of
the state, and this concern is based on human experience in history.
I do not have statistics nor historical expertise, but common sense
informs me that pampered elites at the top of the heap of stratified
social structures all over the world, in centuries past, lived
luxuriously while not working to provide for themselves. Yet, who
could argue that these parasites were happy, grateful, well-adjusted
members of their society? Most were not. People need to work and work
everyday if they would have self-esteem, pure and simple.
