Feeding the World

Win Wenger, Ph.D.

For the past few decades the real problem has been that of distribution. Even in this country, where food is plentiful and cheap, millions go hungry and malnourished.

The unthinking and the social darwinists may easily dismiss the case of the adults, but the children? – The as-yet blameless children who, if their brains, minds and bodies were appropriately nourished, could later be contributing to our culture and civilization as well as any of us? And when we look around the world and see – or don’t see! – millions of human beings dying each year of malnourishment and of the diseases which attend that miserable condition….

The main problem is distribution, an issue we will address here at another time. But sometimes (and in the near future, as world population heaves and bulges up toward seven billion and as our ecology totters toward ruin), supply does pinch a bit. With our topsoil mostly gone and its remainder chemically challenged; with our oceans mostly fished out; with treatment-resistant diseases starting to appear not only in people but in our crops and livestock; and with global warming disrupting local climates upon which our agriculture depends – supply is about to start pinching a lot more than just a bit.

Indus Valley Civilization, the first wave of Mayans, Babylonian Civilization – various major civilizations on record mismanaged their natural resources to the point where they starved and collapsed. Had you suggested to any of them even the possibility of such an outcome beforehand, they would have been too helpless with laughter at the absurdity of the notion to even put a spear in you, which would have been their next response. I expect the equivalent response here, but for those readers who remain at this point, I’m about to suggest here a fairly easy way to increase healthful food supply in the world ten-fold, a hundred times; if need be a thousand times!

Source of Supply

Not only is the ocean mostly fished out, its most productive areas like the St. Georges’ Banks off Newfoundland are pretty well ruined, either forever or for at least many years to come. Many of the varieties of foodfish we’ve come to rely on, overfished, are near extinction. Yet, I think it is the sea that we can look to for vast expansion of the world’s food supply….

Bay of Bengal: We’ve written here before [in the Winsights article, "Save Millions of Lives Around Bengal"] on how to turn the shallow, dangerously storm-ridden Bay of Bengal into a succession of alternating strings of barrier islands and lagoons. Most of the more landward of these islands could be used for conventional agriculture once the salt is leached out – which would not require many monsoon seasons to be done. (The more seaward of those barrier islands would be reinforced various ways and eventually by trees.) It is the succession of lagoons made into fish farms which would be hugely productive, easily able to supply most of the world’s present food needs.

The simple, easy, inexpensive way to accomplish all this – and to accomplish the other, far greater way to increase world food production which we’ll describe several paragraphs below – is in effect “written on the wind.”

Air.

Simply air.

Air pumped by air compressor through hose or pipe.

Air pumped through hose or pipe which is perforated so that the air can escape from it in small bubbles.

Bubbles whose release below water trips up waves or currents – sediment-laden waves or currents which then lose their momentum and drop their load of sediment or sand on the spot, piling up beach, shoreline, island…..

Next time you see snow around a snowfence, set to protect a highway from snowdrifts, notice how the snow piles up downwind of the fence, on the same principle applied to moving air instead of moving water.

You can find much more information of how to use this arrangement, of perforated hose or pipe and air compressor, to protect and even build shorelines, beaches and islands, in the “Inventions” exhibit on this site, in our Beachbuilder article.

Almost the same equipment, but with all release of air at greater depth, at the deep end of the pipe or at least deep underwater along the sea bottom, provides us a simple, easy, inexpensive way to feed the world many times over.

Oceanic Fish Ranching

Even before we fished it nearly dry, most of the ocean was nearly desert, unproductive of life. Its most fertile and productive areas are at or above “the roaring forties” in latitude, north and south, where frequent great winds and storms churn up the water and oxygenate it. The strong currents usually found there also stir up the sea bottom, bringing nutrients to the surface – which was why St. George’s Bank off Newfoundland used to be so richly productive before we fished it dry and trashed it into a severely polluted zone.

Sometimes there is a zone of high productivity at some distance around the mouth of a river flowing into the sea, but with so many poisons in our rivers and streams this is much rarer than it used to be.

The solution is to pump air down to the sea bottom – especially in areas less than a thousand feet deep. Release the air at the bottom of the sea to bubble up. This will not only oxygenate the waters but stir up and bring up bottom nutrients to create a new, artificial, St. George’s Bank-equivalent fish ranch.

This effect can be wrought on almost any scale, in hundreds if not thousands of different locations where the bubble curtain doesn’t intersect or interrupt an important ocean current. Each one of these hundreds or thousands of fish ranch locations can, by itself, feed a significant portion of the world’s population.

We don’t have a good read yet on unit cost of fish produced by this method, but even conventional fish farming has been so economical as to now constitute a majority of the seafood we find in our restaurants. The equipment already exists, ready to be taken down “from the shelf,” and is very inexpensive, and would allow fish production on a grand scale with far lower unit costs than what we now put on our plates. Costs would be low enough to even become the basis of a new industry providing chemicals-free organic fertilizer to land-based produce farms, enriching our land-based dining as well as our seafood dining.

Even the containment “fences” surrounding these fish ranches can be with much the same equipment – at least the same equipment as in “Beachbuilder,” only used differently. The layout would suspend, with anchors and buoys, a set of perforated hose or pipe suspended far enough underwater not to entangle with any ships passing by. Its purpose would be to create a bubble curtain which would keep most of the fish within the contained region of the “ranch,” so most of your assets don’t swim away. Thus, you get to harvest the result of your own investment in “fertilizing” or “ranchifying” a portion of the ocean.

Other Options

Other scientific developments in agriculture bear limited promise – a few percentage points increase here, a few more there, and these do add up, but nowhere nearly on the scale before us as with fish farming and fish ranching. We won’t get into the vegetarian issue here except to observe that while engaging our dietary habits further down the food chain does indeed make more food available, that gain is nowhere in the same ballpark as would be the gains from sea farming, and further is unlikely to become the preferred response of a majority of people any time soon.

Nor will we get here into the issue of artificial gene manipulation – another case of gaining a few percentage points here and there – except to observe that genetics has turned out to be a lot more complex than anything we were led to expect a generation ago, and we now have many strange floating gene bundles and gene fragments flooding wild across the landscape which never had to go through nature’s sieve or “safety net.”

Conclusion

In many, perhaps all, regards, sea farming and sea ranching are not only an easier and more productive, less expensive way to greatly expand world food supply, but arguably the safest way as well.

Please pass this information along to where you think it may do the best good. Please feel free to reprint this article, in whole but not in part, including its copyright notice, to share with people whom you care about.

©2002 Project Renaissance

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Comments to: Win Wenger

Originally posted at Project Renaissance

This morning’s essay is reposted from Edge. James J. O’Donnell, is Professor of Classical Studies and Vice Provost for Information Systems and Computing at the University of Pennsylvania. He recently addressed the graduating senior class. The title of his talk was “A Mutual, Joint-Stock World In All Meridians.” “The title,” he said, “comes from Moby Dick, ch. 13, and is meant to be slightly misleading, inasmuch as the full text, spoken by Queequeg, is: ‘It’s a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians. We cannibals must help these Christians.’ “

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A Mutual, Joint-Stock World in all Meridians

James J. O’Donnell

It was on the 24th of August, in the year 410 of the common era, that the unthinkable came to pass. A guerrilla army, led by a renegade Roman general named Alaric, who had been brought up in a German-speaking community outside the actual boundaries of the Roman empire, ended years of threats and intimidation by invading the city of Rome itself. For three days they remained, destroying, looting, and killing. The exact loss of life was never known and may have been less than fears of the moment said it was, but the experience was a shattering one nonetheless. It had been 800 years since the last such defeat of the city, 800 years in which Rome had grown to be the greatest city in the world, the envy of the nations, the model for what a great city was like.

The shock was felt throughout the Roman world. In far-off Bethlehem, the scholar and monk Jerome, so prolific that one might think of him as the Stephen King of his time, could not work.

Here are his words: “And I was stunned and stupefied, so much so that I couldn’t think about anything else day and night. I felt as if I were being held hostage myself and couldn’t even open my mouth until I knew for sure what had happened. Hanging there, caught between hope and despair, I was torturing myself with the thought of what others were suffering. But after the brightest light of all the lands was extinguished – after the head of the whole Roman empire was lopped off – to speak truly, after the whole world had perished in a single city: I fell silent and was humbled, and I kept my silence and my sorrow was renewed. My heart grew warm within me and fire blazed up in my thoughts …”

I have been reading and thinking about the events of 410 for over thirty years, but never with the intensity and compassion that I have known since that other ghastly day last September. So forgive me: I am a historian, and I have a story to tell this afternoon. History of this kind offers us a way to think about our world – but it offers no obvious or simple answers to our questions. I hope you will give me leave to provoke you for a while.

Roman government’s response to the crisis was military and ineffective. The Roman emperor had years earlier moved his western court to the northern Italian city of Ravenna, protected by surrounding marshes and with a sea-lane for escape, but he sent his troops to pursue the enemy, then negotiate with him, then pursue him some more. From the official perspective, the issue was simple: barbarism versus civilization. The renegade general and his followers were demonized, pursued, and feared. Within a few years, they had migrated to what is now modern Spain and settled there, establishing a regime that thrived independent of Rome for three hundred years – until the Islamic invasions.

The years that followed were marked by a series of such migrations. The Spanish kingdom we call Visigothic, after the ancestral people of their generals. Within the century, Roman Africa fell into the hands of the Vandals from northern Europe, Roman Gaul into the hands of the Franks (who would give their country a name it still holds), and Italy itself became the homeland of the Ostrogoths. Barbarism had triumphed. To be sure, Roman armies in this period were recruited heavily from among the same peoples, and it happened more than once in the fifth century that you could not tell the Romans on a given battlefield without a scorecard – on one occasion two different contenders for the imperial throne itself fought each other through proxy armies led respectively by Vandals and by Visigoths.

But on the ground, it is far from clear that these developments constituted a defeat for civilization. Within a decade of the sack of Rome, Alaric’s successor was being quoted as saying that in his youth he had thought to overthrow the Roman empire and replace it with a Gothic one, but now in power he saw that his people needed the law and structure of Roman civilization to have peace and prosperity for themselves. All of those “barbarian” kingdoms would soon rewrite the Roman law codes for local use and practice, in eloquent testimony to the power of the greatest of Roman civil achievements.

Roman government persisted in demonizing the barbarian, and the politics of the fifth and sixth centuries persisted in seeing the challenges of the age as military and technological. They could not have known or heard the lesson of a famous line from the modern French poet Paul Valery: “Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees.” The Romans of that age knew exactly what they were seeing – and it made them blind to the reality around them.

And so the long dance of Roman armies and barbarian ones played out, and in the end, Rome was the loser. Preoccupation with barbarians took attention away from another more threatening military frontier, the one shared with Persia, and gradually Roman resolve and strength were worn away there. When Islam arose in the seventh century, the remaining Roman power, headquartered at Constantinople (modern Istanbul) was unable to mount more than a token resistance.

But the final irony is important to grasp. You may have visited modern Rome or seen pictures of its ancient ruins, and you may be thinking that the events of 410 of which I spoke earlier can explain what you have seen. Not so.

The greatest destruction visited upon the city of Rome, the depredations that left most of the city a prey to malaria and a home to oxen and owls for a thousand years, came not from barbarian invaders but Roman ones. In the mid-sixth century, the reigning emperor at Constantinople, preoccupied with his vision of barbarism versus civilization, sent his own mercenary army (containing, to be sure, a good many fighters of non Roman stock) to recapture Italy for the empire. The fifteen years of war that followed were responsible for the destruction of much of the physical fabric of Rome, and responsible as well for shattering the political and social unity of the peninsula that had been built up laboriously through many centuries. From the sixth century to the nineteenth, there was no Italy, only a peninsula divided among pieces of other people’s property. That disarray was the result not of barbarism, but of self-styled civilization run amok.

Could it have been otherwise? Was there an alternate future in the aftermath of the sack of Rome? Choices in history are hard to see as we live the history, but perhaps a little easier to see from a distance.

Some of the refugees from the events of August 410 landed up in a grimy seaport city in Africa, then called Hippo Regius, today the city of Annaba in Algeria. A backwater by any standards, it owed its standing to its harbor, through which the grain and olive supply of the province of Numidia – think of it as the Roman Nebraska – came down to the sea for shipment to the capital city. It was a natural place for wealthy refugees to make landfall, and a fair number of them indeed owned the great Numidian estates in the breadbasket of empire.

The leading figure of the city of Hippo in those days was the Christian bishop, Aurelius Augustinus, known to us as Augustine or Augustine. He was at this period a minor provincial figure, known within a limited circle for some of his theological writing (including the Confessions), but deeply engaged in local politics and church politics, fighting a relentless battle against other sects of his own religion. An indefatigable social climber, he made his way among the wealthy refugees, and found there disturbing ideas in circulation. Perhaps, it was being said, the sack of Rome came from a religious failure. For centuries we worshipped the old gods in the old ways and they protected the city; now in the last century we have given allegiance to a puzzling kind of new age religion – Christianity– , and a fat lot of good it has done us.

Augustine could not stand such defeatism, and so began to write a book. His motives were self-interested and polemical, but the book quickly transcended its moment. Over the next two decades, starting from that moment of crisis and doubt, Augustine elaborated his view of human society and human history in the twenty two books of his work entitled the City of God.

The book was finished long after the sack of Rome had faded from the newspapers and before the next wave of invasions trapped Augustine in his own city, where he died in 430. What marks the book is its dramatic and inclusive vision of a society that transcends the divisions of that particular time. This is not the place to outline its contents or its theology, but it should be easy enough for you to imagine the perspective, so familiar is it to moderns. The organizing principle of human history for Augustine was not membership in a given nation or state, but participation in a society that was notionally worldwide in its scope and eternal in its duration.

My point is not to test how much of that particular vision may still make sense today, but to emphasize its visionary quality. In a world where governments and soldiers emphasized division, Augustine found a way to emphasize inclusion. His criterion of inclusion was less than absolutely world-wide, of course, depending as it did on the Christian religion. But all the barbarians whom men feared in those days, all of them, were Christians of one stripe or another. To speak of a Christian vision of society, then, was to find a way to talk about humankind that embraced potentially all the warring and suspicious parties of the time.

Emperors, generals, and armies were little influenced by African bishops and their books. But the grassroots organization of Christianity – in large measure sponsored by government suppression of their opponents – had spread far enough and wide enough in those days to make a difference. When the supposedly “barbarian” communities of the western Mediterranean made their peace and settled down in the fifth and sixth centuries, bishops and monks were the community leaders who made sense of the world, along lines not very different from what Augustine laid out. If you want a hero for this story, you want perhaps not Augustine but Theoderic. Theoderic was the Ostrogothic king of Italy from 490 to 526 CE, a time that contemporaries spoke of as a golden age, when you could leave your money lying by the side of the road at night and find it there untouched in the morning – an exaggeration perhaps, but an exaggeration that speaks volumes for the social order that underlay it. Under his leadership, sects of Christians who engaged in mutual persecution in other lands lived side by side in remarkable harmony. You can visit Theoderic’s massive tomb today in Ravenna, or read his words on at least one Penn website: “civilitas”, the Latin word for something like “civility” or even “civilization”, was his favorite theme. Not bad for a supposed “barbarian”.

But if books are mostly ineffective as instruments of social change in the short term, they can, however, be persuasive in the long run. It can and should be argued and understood that the peculiarly European vision of humankind that gives birth eventually to the university tradition we embody today in our robes and rituals and to a whole series of widening circles of inclusive imagination of human society goes back to this age. The sense of community that binds together western nations today, that gave rise to such diverse organizations as the Catholic Church, the European Union, and World Cup football take their origins in that late antique vision of a society whose inclusiveness transcends old and seemingly obvious divisions.

But what are originally visions of inclusiveness have a way of exhausting themselves. The Roman empire had lost its ability to embrace new peoples by the time of which I have been speaking, and it is only too clear that in our time the traditional religions of the book, though their wisest practitioners speak well and act fairly, have lost much of their persuasive inclusiveness. It is indeed precisely the mode of their claims at universality that puts them most in conflict with each other.

The challenges today are thus obvious and many, but the opportunity is great as well. Few would have thought in the first half of the twentieth century that France and Germany could ever live so much at peace as they do now, and at the height of the Pacific war, it was unthinkable that Japan and the United States could ever become the allies they have now become. Our current strife may find its own comparable resolution, if we are wise and generous and visionary. Whether the vision we need comes from theologians or politicians or holders of McDonald’s franchises is very much in doubt. I take some encouragement from a ragtag band of aging hippies and young computer scientists who are planning to build a clock.

The clock they build – and the library that goes with it – will be designed to live for 10,000 years: the clock of the long now, they call it, and there is a mountain in Nevada under which they plan to build it. They are already preparing for the future in ingenious and whimsical ways. They would report today’s date, for example, as May 13, in the year 02002 – the initial zero being their way of reminding us to begin preparing for the inevitable Y10K crisis, hurtling towards us in a mere 7,998 years. Their mission is to encourage all who hear them to think beyond this year, this decade, or this lifetime, to remember that we live in and share responsibility for a very long future. To look out to that future is to take a deep breath and to find a place for ourselves in a narrative in which our concerns are not so paramount as they inevitably must be on a day like today.

You here may not want to be reminded of this, but very soon now, you graduates will begin bringing children into the world, children some of whom will live to see the year 2100. That’s already a “now” long enough to give pause. Those children will see a world that is surely warmer and more crowded than this one. How else will it seem? That is for us, and for you, to determine, and that will be the real test of the value of what you and we have done here these last four years. Have we taught you to think in the long now? Have we taught you to forget the name of the thing you see, to forget what you think you know and see what is? Have we taught you to promote civility, to build civilization among peoples, rather than merely to oppose barbarism?

I hope we have . . .

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Originally posted at Edge

Lawrence Lessig’s The Future of Ideas

a review by Lucas Hendrich
KurzweilAI.net

The fertile ground of the Internet has led to countless innovations, eliminating physical barriers and allowing a borderless, transparent source of information to flourish. How will the story of the Internet be played out in the 21st Century?

Lawrence Lessig’s The Future of Ideas: The fate of the commons in the connected world is a clear, concise vision of what the Internet is, its history (and its prehistory, in real-world analogs of public spaces), the legal issues that surround and permeate it, and where the Internet and intellectual property may be headed.

One of Lessig’s objectives is to make sure we understand the technical revolution that created the Internet. He guides the reader through its history, explaining technical details in a measured, lucid fashion often grounded in real-world metaphors for the non-technical. In an area of writing that often includes fever-pitched techno-enthusiasm and evangelism, Lessig’s explanations of MP3 technology, the difference between GPL and open source, TCP/IP and other elements of the online world help diffuse the mystery behind jargon that furthers the digital divide between its initiates and those to whom it is unfamiliar.

This history lesson in The Future of Ideas is necessary for Lessig to alert us to legal developments that, in his view, threaten how we experience the Internet–that, if left unchecked, could change the Internet from an open, democratic (albeit chaotic) and interactive universe of data to something resembling closed-circuit television.

For Lessig, the Internet represents a “commons,” a public space that is shared by those who use it and owned by none. Its use is regulated, to greater and lesser extents, by two forces–the strong hand of the state and the invisible hand of the market. He attributes innovations born over the wires of the Internet, as well as the birth of the Internet itself, to its public, common nature. Roads are the metaphor he employs to illustrate the benefit of shared, unowned spaces: the vehicles that use them are owned and must meet state-imposed regulations, but the road itself only enhances the value of other materials–vehicles or property–which use it.

A facet of this commons is that the road itself is simple and unintelligent, like the TCP/IP based architecture of the Internet. By placing intelligence in the vehicles–the servers and PCs at the end of the wires, the network itself remains unintelligent, and therefore cannot discriminate what travels over it. This feature of the Internet–what Lessig terms e2e, for end-to-end–has kept it a common space. This space is layered, and using NYU law professor Yochai Benkler’s model, Lessig reduces the Internet to three layers–physical, code and content. The physical layer has been built e2e, which allows the code and thus the content to flow freely thereby enabling collaboration and innovation .

Lessig summarily shows how each layer of the Internet is being changed by forces of the state, the market, and the effect of the two in concert. The result is ownership of layers, a phenomenon which Lessig believes will by its very nature add intelligence to these layers–thus changing indiscriminate flow of information into something that can be filtered or directed.

One example Lessig cites in terms of the physical layer of the Internet is the merger of AOL and Time Warner, which joins America’s largest ISP (in terms of membership) with a provider of media via cable. Prior to this merger, AOL supported “open access” to broadband cable networks, and government intervention to ensure the separation between the media content flowing over broadband lines and the choice of ISPs available to the consumer to gain access to the Internet. Post-merger, AOL’s stance is to let the market regulate itself. The danger? As Lessig quotes World Wide Web founder Tim Berners-Lee, ” keeping media and content separate…is a good rule in most media. When I turn on the television, I don’t expect it to deliberately jump to a particular channel, or to give a better picture when I choose a channel that has the ‘right’ commercials.” He uses the cases of Napster, MP3.com, Microsoft, and others to illustrate the shifting nature of the code and content layers of the Internet as courts interpret patent and copyright law in ways that, Lessig argues, restrict public use and distribution of code, content and ideas themselves.

Lessig provides suggestions for reform to existing law that would maintain this balance between public and private ownership of virtual space (and the ideas that grow there), thus keeping the Internet fertile. Among many examples is one in which copyrights on software expire after five years; it can be renewed if the author wishes, but will become public (source code and all) if the author does not act. This seems like common sense when one considers how quickly software can advance in five years (he points out how absurd it is that existing law protects software for up to ninety-five years, far past the point of obsoletion).

Ray Kurzweil, in his debates with Bill Joy (and others) over the possible futures of technology, often uses the phrase “promise and peril” to describe the double-edged sword of technological progress. How can the growth of future technologies be promoted without the risk of destructive misuse? A fine balance between private competition and government regulation must be struck in order to keep technology from being exploited for destructive ends.

Similarly, Lawrence Lessig finds promise and peril in the future of the Internet. It was born without much regulation or guidance, public or private. It has been used both constructively and destructively. For Lessig, the promise is in the innovations that have blossomed in the spirit of its original iteration. Conversely, Lessig sees peril in how it may be guided (or over-guided) by state and market forces.

Originally published January 24, 2002 at KurzweilAI.net

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The Future of Ideas at Amazon.com

 

John Hagelin is a world authority in unified quantum field theories. His articles on electroweak unification, grand unification, supersymmetry, and cosmology include some of the most cited references in the physical sciences.

Dr. Hagelin has conducted pioneering work at the forefront of theoretical physics at CERN (the European Center for Particle Physics) and SLAC (the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center), and is responsible for the development of a highly successful grand unified field theory based on the superstring.

This Proposal to Prevent Terrorism is being presented to top leaders in Congress, the White House, the State Department, the Defense Department, and the Pentagon and to leading philanthropists by Dr. John Hagelin, Director of the Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy, and an international team of scientists.

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Proposal to Prevent Terrorism

John Hagelin

I am John Hagelin, and I am the director of Maharishi University of Management’s Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy. I am calling to report on what I think is some quite surprising progress, I think, here in the capital city of Washington, DC, in our efforts to find support – both public support and private support – for our critical program to bring peace to the world, to defuse the acute ethnic and religious and political tensions that are fueling terrorism and threatening to spread this conflict further to different countries.

The U.S. is contemplating where to take the war next. It’s these sorts of tensions, fueling our response to terrorism and fueling terrorism itself, that we can defuse and undercut easily through the approach of reducing societal stress and tension and creating indomitable coherence and unity in the collective consciousness in the world.

I have had the great honor and really wonderful joy of presenting this practical – certainly innovative, but practical – scientifically- proven proposal, this very cost-effective proposal, to take the pressure off our nation’s defenses against terrorism and global defenses against terrorism, and to diffuse the ethnic conflicts and social conflicts that have really plagued humankind for generations.

I was dispatched to Washington, DC, to see whether the U.S. government would be responsive to an entirely different approach to safeguarding our country against terrorism. And I have found during the course of this month, in meeting after meeting with the top levels of government – the White House, the National Security Council, the Department of State, the Department of Defense, the Army, the House, the Senate – I have found an absolutely unprecedented response that I certainly would not have expected based upon the years I have spent in Washington, DC, promoting innovative solutions.

People recognize here that our nation’s defenses against terrorism, and the world’s defenses, are remarkably porous. Nothing, for example, that has ever been conceived – including the hundred-billion-dollar missile defense shield – would have provided any security, any safety, against the attacks of September 11, or against the anthrax threat that has come since.

So our defenses against terrorism are absolutely porous. And the government is expending, as you know, tens of billions of dollars in this global effort to stamp out terrorism, and doing it in a way that is at best very inefficient.

In talking in the White House, for example, when I was invited back for a further presentation recently, I asked the Special Assistant to the President for Homeland Defense, “Even if we succeed in martyring bin Laden, will that really prevent new people, new recruits, from taking up this fanatical cause?”

And he said that he did not believe that it would. Nobody I talked to thought that martyring bin Laden was going to put a stop to, or even decrease, the number of people who were swept up in this conflagration, this disease of terrorism.

So our defenses are thin, and the approach is wanting. And I have never seen the government, frankly, so humble, or so open to innovative solutions.

The Defense Department has published a public call to Hollywood and to the general public for ideas on how we can outsmart and somehow defend ourselves against terrorism. But ideas that are practical and effective and scientifically proven have not been forthcoming.

Our effort, even though it is certainly “outside the box” of what has been considered in the past, is the only approach that has really been backed by scientific research. And it has received a tremendous audience and tremendous response.

I am very familiar with Capitol Hill. Following my presidential candidacy, the Earthcode & Inner Light International Network was founded, a forward-looking institute to put forth proven, prevention- oriented solutions in harmony with Natural Law.

Since then, we have been working with the government. One idea we have put forth, for example, is to support preventive medicine. Preventive medicine is verifiably cost effective. It is an idea which, you would think, is simply common sense. It is undeniably effective. Nevertheless, the idea once enraged certain Congressmen – members of the Republican Party and the House, for example.

So times have changed, for what we are finding now is absolutely, completely different.

And what we are presenting, certainly, is far more avant garde, far more cutting edge, than preventive medicine. Because really, the approach we are talking about is a technology of consciousness – harnessing, accessing, stimulating, and applying – for the first time in history – the most powerful field of Natural Law, the Unified Field.

We are talking about harnessing this Unified Field that is at the foundation of the universe, and using it to generate indomitable waves of unity and positivity, spreading that influence into the collective consciousness of the world.

We propose doing this through a group of professionals – 40,000 experts created and cost-effectively sustained in India, thousands of miles from the United States.

This is the proposal, scientifically founded, but certainly far beyond the realm of what has been considered in the context of our defense and foreign ministry before. This is the policy – 40,000 experts, stimulating and enlivening unity in the collective consciousness of the world, defusing acute social, religious, ethnic, and political tensions.

We have made this proposal based upon fifty previous studies that have appeared in the world’s top scientific journals.

And this is the proposal that has been met with such remarkable response!

Starting from Ground Zero

So, for example, we have spoken to members of Congress. And typically, our proposal has had enough merit on the surface that we have gotten through the appointment secretaries and scheduled the appointments. But generally speaking, by the time we sit down across from them, the congressmen, the senators, have not really had an opportunity to be briefed on the nature of the solution we are proposing. And that means we are usually starting from ground zero.

By “we,” I am referring to others who have helped. For example, sometimes I have had the good fortune to bring with me in these meetings Dr. Peter Salk, son of Dr. Jonas Salk, developer of the Salk vaccine. Also, Dr. Jonas Salk himself has helped, and Dr. David Edwards, a very esteemed professor of political science at the University of Texas in Austin who has written ten textbooks on the subject of politics, foreign policy, and conflict mediation. Also there are a large number of non-meditating scientists who in the past have been in a position to review our research for publication and who have conducted research in the context of our Washington, DC, crime reduction study and other studies.

These experts who come to the meetings with me represent a large and growing number of scientists who will absolutely attest to the scientific reality and the effectiveness of the approach that we are promoting.

A Preventive Approach

So, armed in many cases with this very powerful, credentialed scientific team, we go into offices of senators and congressmen. We are starting at ground zero, sitting across from an often surprised and even stunned member of Congress, who may sit poker-faced for five or ten minutes.

And then, gradually, we see him visibly soften as he is exposed to the logic – the very simple and compelling logic – that Maharishi himself, in conversations I have had with him, has suggested is so common sense and undeniable.

For example, crime and violence have been with us in every generation. And yet in every generation there has been a penal code, meting out punishments in response to crime. So this approach has been ineffective, and violence has persisted, generation after generation. What we need, and what everybody recognizes that we need today, is an effective preventive approach. Because the punishment of crime is not preventive. It punishes people once the crimes have been committed. And obviously the penal code’s small component of deterrence is not enough.

And punishment is of course absolutely meaningless when it comes to suicide bombers who are ready to give their lives in order to claim the lives of others. What possible use could the threat of punishment be to perpetrators of these desperate fanatical acts of terrorism? Obviously, none.

Something that is truly preventive in nature is obviously what is needed. So that logic is extremely compelling. And it’s compelling to remind the members of Congress that they actually have nothing new to offer this new situation. That the mightiest countries in the world, with their $300 billion defense budgets, have absolutely no capability of defending ourselves effectively against this.

Quantum Physics and Societal Coherence: A Recent Nobel Prize-Winning Discovery

Recent scientific discoveries are with us. The Nobel Prize that was awarded three weeks ago now for physics is a direct experimental confirmation of the principles of societal coherence that we are implementing in our collective meditation approach.

For those who haven’t been following the science news, I’ll quickly remind you of what this Nobel prize-winning discovery was. It’s quite remarkable and directly applicable. It demonstrates the exact principles of collective consciousness that we are applying in our proposals to prevent violence and terrorism.

The Nobel Prize was awarded to a very, very remarkable experiment confirming something that Einstein and the Indian physicist Bose predicted back in the 1920s.

And today’s scientists did was to take atoms – rubidium atoms – and slow them down using sophisticated laser techniques.

Simply by slowing the atom downs, the quantum mechanical nature of the atom began to become more and more evident, because the wave function of the atom began to spread.

These wave functions are ordinarily so small that the atoms appear effectively to be particulate in nature. But when the particles are slowed down – as the momentum goes toward zero – the wave function goes toward infinity. Practically speaking, the wave function reaches a few millimeters in size, which is large for an atom. And when that happens, you begin to see that these are not atoms at all. These are just waves of some purely abstract “field of rubidiumness.”

That’s all an atom is. A rubidium atom is just a wave in an abstract ocean of existence – in this case, a “field of rubidiumness.”

So when these rubidium wave functions become so big, you start to see these so-called particles bending around corners and behaving like waves – refracting, defracting, interfering with each other.

And when the waves get so big that they start to overlap one another, then something even more remarkable happens. The wave functions lose their individual identities totally, and the whole assemblage of atoms becomes one giant wave of intelligence. One giant wave of flowing intelligence. One wave, one macroscopic wave of this absolutely abstract field of rubidiumness. So a rubidium atom is no more an elementary particle than I am, or than you are.

These are not elementary particles. These are big, fat atoms with hundreds of particles in them. And what this shows is that even big systems, even complicated systems like you and me – we slow down when we are systematically de-excited. And when we slow down, we lose that individual existence and we all become what we are anyway – waves of a common field, a universal field of intelligence.

So in this collective practice of Transcendental Meditation and its advanced techniques from the Vedic tradition of India, specific mantras are compiled to produce a particular resonance of unity and peace. And when these waves, these vibrations, are emitted ensemble by a group, an influence is created that is truly global. Individual consciousness, as it transcends, loses that individual smallness and becomes one flowing impulse of wholeness.

The Maharishi Effect

Anyway, at these meetings, in describing the mechanics of what is called the Maharishi Effect, we use some very obvious examples. For example, there is the fact that two loudspeakers, moved close together, produce four times the sound of a single loudspeaker, because the coherent superposition of sound – the intensity of that sound, the power of the sound – grows as N-squared: the number of the loudspeakers squared. Three loudspeakers close together produce the sound of nine individual loudspeakers. That’s a very universal, elementary principle of constructive interference.

But we are adding to that, now, a uniquely quantum mechanical mechanism such as this rubidium example, which shows us two things: From the experiment, we know that when a rubidium atom is in the vicinity of other rubidium atoms, each of those atoms displays an increased tendency to transcend, to go global or unmanifest, to become universal in the presence of others. That’s called Bose Statistics. The experiment also illustrates the disappearance of individuality – the expansion of individuality to become universality.

These mechanisms are identical to the mechanism of individual consciousnesses displaying an increased inherent tendency to become global, to transcend as a group.

These scientific tests show that an individual mind, fully expanded, is global. And so this trained group of experts will have an influence, as a whole, far more than the sum of the individual parts.

Science is with us, in both theory and experiment.

In these last few months, remarkably, some of the greatest studies verifying empirically this phenomenon of collective consciousness have appeared in peer-reviewed scientific journals – top journals. These include the Lebanon study by Professor John Davies, Professor Skip Alexander, and others, where the collective application of Maharishi’s TM and TM-Sidhi program was used seven times to reduce war deaths by an average of 71 percent.

These seven consecutive replications lowered war related injuries and increased progress toward peace with a statistical confidence that was absolutely unprecedented in the history of social science.

Unprecedented Understanding and Acceptance

Now, talking to congressmen, talking to people in the White House, in the National Security Council, in the Secretary of State’s office, the Department of Defense, and the Army – people who have promised, collectively, to provide for the security of our country and yet have been absolutely unable to deliver on that promise – it took these people only ten, fifteen, or twenty minutes – thirty minutes sometimes – to comprehend the gravity, the importance, the significance of this scientific breakthrough, and see that it is really an answer to their prayers.

So these were very, very interesting meetings, very sobering. In almost every case, the individual said, “I am surprised at the degree to which I get what you are saying and the degree to which I find myself fully in support of your proposal. I probably would not have acted this way, responded this way, prior to the 11th of September.”

But everything has changed. And the collective consciousness in the country significantly, profoundly, has changed since that time – there is more humility, and more need to recognize the shortcomings of our outmoded technology of defense-based-upon-offense.

Stories of Individual Responses

In the Congress, there was this one Democratic Congressman who is a member of the science committee. And he was a very thoughtful man, and absolutely, sternly silent at the beginning of our presentation. And he began to offer comments indicating that he understood.

By the end of this thirty-minute or forty-minute meeting, he was on the phone. He called three billionaires from his constituency on our behalf. He was calling other members of Congress, members of the terrorism committee of Congress, and the science committee of Congress, and setting up more meetings for us, including some very top people – including Nancy Pulosi [D-San Francisco], the newly elected minority whip.

And everybody – everybody – responded in the same way. Republicans and Democrats. Representative Wayne Gilcrest [R-MD] not only phoned some very important billionaires, but he also formed a committee, a group of congressmen with whom we have already met to implement support of our effort.

Congressman Kucinich – widely beloved, and known for his legislation to create a Department of Peace within the U.S. government – drafted an amendment to the Defense Appropriations Bill. That is a $300- plus billion bill to defend the country, and his amendment actually proposes to fund a group of 40,000 experts of these Vedic technologies of consciousness in India. And it has powerful support from both Republican and Democratic members of the House of Representatives – a tremendously unprecedented thing.

The Republican-led Congress needed to fuel the war machine and so it had cut down discussion of further amendment. So this amendment didn’t receive a full hearing in the Congress. But two to three weeks after our arrival and the commencement of this project, the support was such that there was in fact an amendment to our Defense Appropriations Bill to cover this approach. And members in the White House, the National Security Council, and the State Department also received tremendous support and confidence from Congress for their own efforts to implement what we were talking about.

I remember our meeting with Congressman Christopher Shays (R-CT), because he was one of the only members of congress, the Administration, the Army, the National Security Council, the State Department, or the White House who didn’t seem to be aware of my previous presidential candidacy. He didn’t recognize me.

After a few moments of our discussion, he interrupted and said, “This sounds a lot like the Natural Law Party.”

I looked at him, and then I looked at my watch and realized that I didn’t have a lot of time. So I just said, “Yeah, the Natural Law Party supported this approach because it is proven and prevention-oriented and in harmony with Natural Law.”

And then I went on, but Shays interrupted me again. “You know, I’m surprised by the fact that I get this,” he said. “I totally get this. But nobody else will. Politically, you’re not going to make any progress. I get this, but others won’t.”

And I said, “Just wait and see. Because everybody has been telling me they get this but other people aren’t going to get this. Everybody has said exactly the same thing.”

And indeed, this is what we found.

Congressmen Reading the Vedas

Now, fortunately, there is a coordination of these people who thought they were loners, but are not.

Gilcrest, for example, thought he was a loner; he was reading books on physics and consciousness. He was fascinated. He didn’t care about the empirical practicalities, he wanted to go deep into the knowledge of the Veda and of the Unified Field, and of Consciousness. And he thought he was completely a loner in the Congress.

But now these people are getting networked to the point where an amendment was drafted and ready to be supported by both parties.

Deflating the Influence of Terrorism

In the White House, in our second meeting, we were invited back for a wonderful meeting with the Special Assistant to the President for Homeland Security – a very intelligent person who brought also with her another member of the president’s staff. And the questions were absolutely brilliant.

And I know one of the questions was, “Well, you know, I recognize that you can substantially reduce the incidence of terrorism by diffusing societal stress and religious and ethnic tensions through your technology. But can you also somehow reduce the disproportionate influence of a terrorist act?

He cited the example of anthrax – five letters sent by one person, and the whole Senate is practically shut down. People are afraid to go out and shop. A hugely disproportionate effect. And he said, “Can you inoculate the country against these excessive psychological vulnerabilities and mood swings?”

And I cited, of course, the research on the stock market and the national mood, and the instability becoming a great stability, with growth of optimism and confidence, and so forth. And he was very, very excited about that.

He said, “But can you possibly consider this for for us? Not just in India? What about creating a group here, for us, in the United States, maybe five or ten thousand – to create more of a coherent influence in this country?” [This question causes great hilarity on the part of those listening to the conference call.]

And I said, “Well, I normally don’t grant such favors [pause for extended laughter], but you know, if the government pays for it and it’s within the military, I could conceive of a prevention wing of the military in this country as well. It wouldn’t be as cost-effective. But, you know, anything is possible.” [More laughter. The listeners know that the National Law Party has been offering this plan to every president since Reagan.]

The “Red Line Process”: Intimations for the Future

And so the questions were really good. And right now, someone very high in the state department – a name that you probably know, but I need to be a little bit quiet about this – anyway, someone very high is preparing briefing papers. What this means is that a careful, scientific review of our proposal will be circulated in the White House and the Department of State in what’s called the “red line” process.

The red line process is very different from “red tape.” Nothing ever happens with red tape, but “red line” means that this proposal will not stop, will not rest, until it is either implemented or – for one reason or another – rejected. So hopefully within a day or two that brief will be circulating in the White House.

Also, an even more remarkable response is anticipated within a few weeks from the Department of State, and I won’t go a great deal into that right now either.

But anyway, the Department of Defense and the advanced research programs there are having tremendous meetings and further meetings and follow-up meetings. These people are incredibly busy.

The Difference: Now and Then

Maharishi himself found it extremely auspicious – “significant” was his word – that we were being received and invited with such dignity into the White House at higher level meetings than we have ever, ever experienced before.

In the past, we have had the kind of meetings where somebody who plays golf with the President says something, or where we are playing chess or bridge and something gets said, all very indirect. We have never before had the sort of access to the White House or the departments of state and defense or the congress that we have had in these last few weeks.

Whether something practical comes out of it or not in terms of funding – and I think it will – what is happening is that this thinking is permeating the highest levels of government to the point where it is easier and easier in every meeting for the people we are talking to to deeply comprehend what we are saying.

It is as though a critical mass has been met. We are bumping into congressmen now who are running around with our proposal in their hands

Response from the Private Sector

Some of these calls from Congress and some of the calls are resulting in meetings with billionaires and multimillionaires. And some of these people are really, really responding.

I’ll just mention one. Michael Milken is a very interesting, very wonderful person. He is the person who is rather notorious (served time) for introducing the concept of high-yield (junk) bonds as an effective investment instrument. That created a bit of a frenzy, and he ended up – that whole industry ended up – in some difficulty. But he’s a brilliant man. I’d say he’s a genius. And he’s very philanthropic, very compassionate. And he is thinking deeply and contacting people within his circle of influence, which is a huge circle of influence.

I still suspect that it will be the private sector that responds first. That the government will be more comfortable in year two or year three.

We need these innovators, these early innovators, as a startup venture to get this process moving.

To view the proposal that so many congressman are “running around with in their hands” and that is opening so many doors in the private sector, please visit Permanentpeace.org.

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Permanent Peace

The following dialogue was presented on Radio National, a part of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, in 1998.  From the program intro: Today, Robert Theobald tackles the subject that won him fans across Australia last year: the issue of work, the attitudes we have to employment and the changes and challenges we face going into the next millennium.

Robert Theobald is an author, futurist thinker and the creator of The Future of Work, which ran on Radio National last year and has now gone into book form. He recognised back in the ’60s that it would be impossible to stay with the current maximum growth orientation and that realisation led him to look at the need for very different ways to relate to work and income.

Today Robert Theobald is joined by Charles Brass, an Australian who heads the Future of Work Foundation out of Melbourne. Charles has been challenging Australians to think about the need to move beyond the current patterns of thought for several years, and he often starts his talks by reminding people of how dramatically the labour force has changed in the last few decades and how little policies have altered.

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 Work: Changes and Challenges

Robert Theobald & Charles Brass

For the first time in human history, we can imagine a world in which people would choose the work they do in ways and amounts that satisfy them. Western societies have typically refused to look at this possibility, preferring to run on the current treadmill which has been increasing hours on the job in recent years in order to increase, or at least maintain, current standards.

The patterns since World War II have broken with the past. There was a steady decline in hours on the job during the first half of the 20th century. In the 50 years since the end of World War II, the decline in hours has slowed, stopped and even been reversed. This has occurred despite the growing evidence that there are more and more activities where people and the systems of which they are a part, would benefit from shorter times at work.

What is happening? Why have we refused as a society to take advantage of technological improvements to increase our free time? The essential reason is that for most people, it is taking more hours on the job, or more family members at work, to maintain existing standards of living. Buying the same amount of goods and services requires more commitment to earning money than was the case in the past.

Our current commitment to maximum economic growth has become counterproductive. The real needs of people and communities are no longer to obtain more stuff. Rather, more and more people want to enhance their quality of life rather than the quantity of goods they can obtain. People are ready to change the way they evaluate success in their own lives. They are looking for new ways to obtain satisfaction. While I know that people will not settle for failure or for having less of what they value than in the past, I know that they are willing to look at alternatives which are more achievable.

I am convinced that one of the reasons change agents have often been ineffective is that they have aimed to convince the public they must give up current standards, rather than help them look for more satisfactory directions. Today we shall look at the new ideas which are emerging about work and which offer positive options. More and more employers are sensing that work must engage not only the energies but also the passions of their workers if they are to meet their goals.

Even in this new context however, the idea that we could organise society so that people could choose the work they enjoy seems unrealistic to many. One basic objection always seems to be that nobody would be willing to do the unpleasant work. There are three primary answers to this issue. One is that we fail to recognise how different ideas about desirable work are. Not everybody wants to be involved in thinking; some prefer hard physical toil. Indeed, when tasks are allocated according to expressed preferences, it is amazing how much work gets done without people being forced to do what they don’t enjoy.

It is also critical to recognise that one of the ways that we decrease the amount of toil, as opposed to desirable work, is that we free ‘important’ people from doing unpleasant work. We are recognising that separating individuals from the chores and frustrations inherent in every day life gives them a distorted perspective which separates them from ordinary concerns and widens the gulf between the elites of the culture and the general public.

A third step is to decide which work people do not want to do and concentrate our technological imagination on how to get it done in different ways.

But even if it proved impossible to get all the dirty work done these ways, there are two very simple additional steps which are feasible. The first would simply increase the payments for the work that people did not want to do. We would move from our present culture where the more attractive work is normally the best paid, to one where the least attractive work gained more money. This reversal would have many interesting effects. This way of looking at the world also suggests that in the future there may be competition for the most exciting work that will drive down its financial rewards.

The other step that might make sense, although it goes severely against the grain of current thinking, would be to require everybody to engage in ‘unpleasant’ work at some point in their lives. The challenge might come in the teenage years when people have lots of energy. Indeed what seems unpleasant in later life might be seen as attractive if the structures were created well. It has long been recognised that sitting people at school desks when their hormones are running strongly, is asking for trouble. In addition, such a process would enable young people of different classes to learn to live and work with each other.

In order to discuss these and other questions, Charles Brass, who runs the Future of Work Foundation in Australia, will be talking with me. Charles has been thinking and acting to bring about change for several years. Last year he found ways to bring me to Australia and he is now part of a broader effort which will enable me to come back in September and October of this year.

Charles, I know from what you have told me in the past that people tend to reject the type of conclusions that I have developed there. You have, however, some data on trends which confirms the fact that past trends have already been broken, and that we have no choice but to move in radically different directions. Perhaps we can start with some of the things that you talk about when you raise these issues.

Charles Brass: Robert, thank you for a very thoughtful introduction, you even give me plenty to think about!

One of the slides that I tend to use is a picture of the front cover of the Bureau of Statistics Monthly Report on Employment Statistics in 1962. It has two graphics on it: one showing a man working at a lathe, another showing a man sitting at a desk with a telephone, and at the end of the desk is a typewriter and a pretty young girl typing away. And back in 1962 that pretty well described the world of work. The changes since then are huge and profound, not just the technological ones you’ve raised, but the extent to which work has ceased being a physical activity and become much more the shifting of information and also very profoundly, the extent to which women have moved from being a marginal part of the workforce, to being nearly 50% of the workforce this year.

Robert Theobald: You also talk about the fact that we think about full-time work, we think about 9 to 5 Monday to Friday, and that that’s really not the norm any more.

Charles Brass: Oh no. Well certainly 9 to 5, Monday to Friday is a working pattern enjoyed or worked by less than 10% of the Australian population in the 1990s. But I think the more interesting phrase is the one you used. ‘full-time’. Full-time work seems to me to be one of the most offensive phrases ever foisted on a population.

It began as an industrial concept, particularly in this country I think, as different from other countries where a very centralised system determined standard working hours. And it’s always been a sub-set of actual hours in a week. I mean full-time work was originally the sort of 40-hour week, and there have always been 168-hours in a week, so it’s always been a bit anachronistic in that sense. But what seems to me to have characterised our behaviour in the last 20 years, is we seem hell-bent on actually proving that the phrase ‘full-time work’ means what it says, in that those people who are fortunate enough to have ‘a full-time job’ are now being increasingly required by their employers to demonstrate that they mean it, that they are in fact owned by the employer for as much time as the employer can possibly squeeze out of them. And that seems to me to be an inappropriate way to behave.

Robert Theobald: But don’t you think that in a sense people are also willing to go along in the sense that they say, ‘Somehow we have to keep up our standard of living and if the cost is to work harder’, isn’t it both sides of the equation that there are people, although you know, as we go along we also remember that there are people playing, I mean this is an incredibly complex set of fluxes and trends and everything else, but it seems to me some people are still in, ‘Well if we keep working hard enough, we won’t have to change the way we live; we won’t have to think about the quality of life rather than the standard of living; we won’t have to change the perspective we have on life’.

Charles Brass: Yes, well one of the characteristics of the full-time job is that it also provides a full-time income, although particularly at the bottom end of the spectrum real wages seem to have been decreasing for a while. But certainly for hard core full-time people, the rewards have been significant and they have provided people with the opportunity to maintain their standard of living. And the alternate form of work, which is usually called part-time, but I think actually is much broader than that, and I prefer to use the word ‘contingent’ forms of work, are not only less secure but also less remunerative, which makes it difficult for people to maintain those standards.

Robert Theobald: Why are we finding it so difficult to understand that the world of work is so radically different from what it used to be? Why do we cling on to images that really don’t fit at all? What is it that makes it so difficult for us to just say, ‘This is a new world therefore it needs new practices’ because another one you raise is that talking about retirement in the context that we do which when we started in Germany it was 2% of the people who lived over 65, now with the longer life expectancies make the way we think about retirement at least to me, totally nonsensical. How are we so blocked? How do we continue to stick with models that even sort of a cursory examination should lead us to say ‘Hey, we have to rethink this’. We’ve got a debate on Social Security going on in the United States which assumes that growth is possible forever into the future, and that you aren’t going to rethink how we conceptualise retirement at all.

Charles Brass: Yes I think talking about retirement is something we need to do in this conversation. But your original question, Why is it that we find it so difficult to conceive the change? I think there is a simple but quite profound answer to that. And that is actually for me embodied in the word ‘work’ itself. When I use the word ‘work’ I mean something much more than employment, and yet when certainly the political world uses the word ‘work’, they are thinking about that range of human activity which fits into the economic way of doing things, which fits into the model that a business, an organisation, has an idea, produces a product or whatever and then people attach to the wealth that is created in that product through the process of employment, takes the money out and then take it home and spend the money.

That particular form of getting work done that we call employment, has always been a very, well a relatively small sub-set of the work done in a society. And in fact over the last 30 years it seems to me that that as a proportion has been decreasing, and there are some statistics to back that up. And I think if we can just shift our focus away from getting work done through employment, to as you said in your introduction, getting work done through human endeavour and human satisfaction, we would come up with models that were thinking about the future rather than just reproducing the past.

Robert Theobald: I remember when we were talking in Australia, one of your vigorous complaints was that whenever you tried to do this sort of conversation and you introduced the word ‘work’, you saw people absolutely drifting back to employment. And of course we do exactly the same things with the Gross National Product figures, because we say that the only work that counts is remunerated work, and therefore the gap between a developing country where all the same sorts of home-based work etc. go on, and Australia is much wider than it really is, because all of that work takes place all over the world and yet we have made it invisible to ourselves and in consequence we sort of say, ‘Well if we give them more employed work everything is getting better’ and forgetting what are the crosscuts about what that does to the other work that goes on in the culture, and of course the social structures that get damaged in that process of saying, ‘Oh you’ve all got to be in a job in order to have a meaningful life in order to have resources etc.’

Charles Brass: Yes it’s a very big challenge. And for me, another one of the phrases that I use is I describe unemployment as a myth, which gets a bit of a laugh occasionally, probably a sardonic laugh because many people are clearly affected by increasing levels of unemployment. How could we possibly describe unemployment as a myth? Well it’s for exactly this reason. The particular form of work that we do in employment seems to be in some short supply, but the amount of work we want done as a people in Australia, seems to be if not increasing, certainly far beyond the current amount of work that’s done.

If I sit down with people and invite them to make a list of things they would like done, that are not done, everybody can come up with a list. And most people can come up with a list of people they know who are not doing as much as they want to do. So to suggest we have a shortage of work seems to me to be crazy.

So it does seem to me that the question is not about work that needs doing or whether perhaps technology is replacing people with machines, it does seem to me the question is about value, and how is it that a society creates value, how is it that people attach to that value or how is it distributed, and that’s where I think we need to focus the question.

Robert Theobald: Why is that we have in a sense, lost touch with the other values? I mean the United States is a classic case of this, where all sorts of human work relationships, for example childcare, is incredibly badly compensated. Almost all of the work which actually helps people to make more sense of their lives, is the work that doesn’t get paid. And now what’s getting paid is this incredible monster of information which at least in my mind is eating us up, an ‘Infoglut’. And now what’s getting paid is this incredible monster of information which at least in my mind is eating us up, an Infoglut. And I hope at some point we’re going to say, ‘You know, you can have too much information.’

So how do you engage this question? What are the places when you talk to people and audiences where they sort of say, ‘Ah ha, I’d never thought of it that way and if I think about it that way, I begin to see what you’re getting at.’

Charles Brass: Well Robert, that brings me right back to my first contact with you, and that is your most recent book is called ‘Reworking Success’, and the point you make in there is that the success criteria of the 20th century cannot afford to be the success criteria of the 21st. And I think this is where we do have this big dilemma. If you just stand back and have a look, even with the increased division in our societies, both in your country and in mine, there is no doubt that this economic world has reaped huge benefits, not just in physical things, and not just in the technology that allows us to sit on opposite sides of the world and talk today.

Robert Theobald: With a little difficulty in the connections!

Charles Brass: Yes, that’s true. But the audience doesn’t need to know about that.

Robert Theobald: Why not?

Charles Brass: Also in our increased lifespans, and our increased health and our capacity to deal with the things that would have killed us years ago. We’ve been hugely successful. And I think because of that success, we have continued to do well what has brought us that success, and it is only now slowly that we’re coming to the point of saying, ‘Well yes it’s true that that brought some success, but we left some things behind. So can we just hold on for a while and bring those other things up to the same level so we can go forward as whole human beings rather than just part human beings.’ And to come back to your original question, it’s about that point where my audiences start immediately to say ‘Yes, that’s how I feel. I feel as though a significant part of me is being left behind, but I’m so caught up in a system that seems out of my control that I can’t do anything about it.’

Robert Theobald: And I think one of the surprises we’ve had in the work we’ve been doing together is how much resonance there really is if we could only put it together, but it’s still sort of fragmented, and the number of people who have written and called and said, ‘You’re speaking to the concern I have’, but how do we deal with this in a culture which clearly sees at least at the sort of public level, these sorts of questions as irrelevant, crazy, marginal, any of those terms. How do we get together so we can begin to say, ‘Look, we’re not marginal, there are lots of us out here, in fact probably we’re a majority’ and it is rhetoric of the elite that is the marginal thing if only we could get together and talk about what matters to us.

Charles Brass: Yes there’s a nice phrase in a newspaper article that I read the other day by an economist here in Melbourne. He said that as human beings we want to shop 24 hours a day, we want to be entertained 24 hours a day, we want to have all those benefits. But as employees we still want to work 9 to 5 Monday to Friday. And I think there’s something in that tension, that we’ve created this world in which we see ourselves as divided into employees and then people. And it’s some reconception of that as a whole where we start seeing ourselves as having multiple parts but of being part of a coherent whole, somewhere in there we’re going to find a way of getting people together. …

Robert Theobald: I want to come back to your reworking success because it seems to me that one of our dilemmas is that cultures really have never changed in history, at least this is how I read Arnold Toynbee. And what has happened is cultures have said, ‘We’re doing very well; we’re going to go on doing very well’ and eventually they ran out their string and some other culture which had started from a different, later place, said, ‘OK, we can do better than you can’ and took over.

Now there are couple of problems with that, it seems to me. First of all, we’re part of the cultures which would lose, but secondly I think much more deeply, I think we do live in a global culture, I don’t think you can now say that China or India or anywhere else is not caught in the same set of success criteria that the west has imposed. And unless somehow we can find a new process whereby we as individuals, as communities, as Internet communities, as all of these things begin to say ‘We must have this conversation, we must ask whether this is the success we want’, and that perhaps gives it a different framing, it makes it easier perhaps for us to say, ‘Well it’s not surprising this is difficult.’ It has to be difficult, this is new, this is not something where we’re immensely skilled and perhaps our frustration with ourselves in terms of, ‘Well, we haven’t got it right yet’ and we keep on having difficulty moving, changing, etc., would be less hard to handle if we realised just what a huge shift this was in the way we’ve always run societies.

Charles Brass: Yes, well you strike a very personal note with me. As you know, four years ago I had what I think would be described as a pretty successful corporate career. And the main reason that I quit that career was the fear (because I have young children) that exactly what you’ve just described would take place; that some other society somewhere, and it might be, well, wherever it comes from, some other society somewhere is going to take over because we’re too stupid to change. And I found it difficult to look my children in the eye and say that that was the world I was creating for them.

And I have to say that while the last three years or so haven’t been easy, they have at least made it clear to me that it is possible, and that the only restrictions exist inside our head. The technology now exists to do things in almost any way we like, and that seems to me to be the real wonder of the late 20th century. We now have the technology to do things almost any way we like. We seem hell-bent on doing them in one particular way, which seems to be the biggest and the fastest, but there’s no reason why we have to do them that way. And recapturing some of this for me seems to be giving enough of us enough understanding about the technology to be able to say ‘Hey, why don’t we do it this way? And then we will go fast when we need to go fast, but we’ll also go slow when we need to go slow.’

Robert Theobald: Well let’s imagine somebody listening to this program at the moment. Let’s assume they’re liking it, and they say, ‘All right, this is great stuff, what do I do?’ And the trouble is that you can’t answer it as we both know on a generic basis, but how does one go to that person, or how does one speak to that person besides saying in a sense, ‘Unfortunately we can’t answer that question, it’s a question you’ve got to answer for yourself because you are in a unique position, you have your unique issues, and you have to find what you can do.’ But is there another cut beyond that where we can say, ‘But there are nevertheless, some things that we can talk about with you, about right livelihood, or about companies needing to operate differently like for example, the Semmler Company in Brazil, which says ‘We can really involve all of our employees in this’ and that as you said in one of your notes to me, essentially the business is not more than the common purposes of the employees.

Charles Brass: Yes well you’re right, it is difficult to say to any one individual. And I think in addition to what you’ve just said, there’s another reason why it’s difficult, and that is that we are dividing our society into people who are seen as successful, the way we define success at the moment, and it’s very difficult for those people to give up that success. And then on the other hand we have people who are pretty well excluded from the system, and all they see is ‘Well just let me in there, let me in and give me some access to some of this and the world will be better.’ So it is difficult to talk to people.

But I think we can make some general statements about what the future will look like if we’re going to go down the road we’re talking compared to the present. At the moment, and it seems to me the language of economics helps here – at the moment the world seems consumed with the concept of a transaction, or the concept of transactions: everything is being done on a transactional basis and my understanding of a transaction is that first of all it’s done between relatively distant parties, parties who are probably coming together purely for the purposes of this particular transaction, and that the nature of the transaction and the value that’s created in it, is able in some sense to be objectively verified by a third party. So in this country, for example, we have Competition Commissions; we have Ombudspeople; we have all sorts of infrastructures in place which are supposed to protect the objectivity of the transactions that take place in the economic world.

And clearly, many of the things that happen in our world have to happen through that transactional basis. If we’re never going to have any future contact with each other, then we’ve got to have some mechanism in place that tries to restore a common base, and some equity between the partners so that things are done fairly. But most of what actually drives us as human beings, it seems to me, is much more about relationship than about transaction. And the essential differences in the context that I’m putting them here, are that first of all the relationship is between parties who intend to have some ongoing contact with each other. So protection from an imbalance can be restored or organised in the ongoing sequence of contact between people.

But most particularly that the value that is determined in a relationship is mixed up with the whole relationship concept. It’s not meant to be objectively seen; it’s not intended for example, that there be some objective measure of the amount of pocket money you give your children. That really is something that’s messed up with the whole business of family dynamics and your particular circumstance and relationship, and it makes little sense at all to talk about an international standard for pocket money.

Robert Theobald: Have we done that yet?

Charles Brass: Well no, I’m sure someone’s going to suggest it now that I’ve raised the idea.

And so it seems to me that if this is true, if there is a sense in which people want to recapture some sense of that relationship, then what that means for the future is that another word that you use enormously, the word ‘community’ is going to have to characterise much more of the way in which we behave than it does at the moment. And that instead of making ourselves hell-bent on coming up with internationally competitive standards for everything; we need those standards. Clearly the environment for example must be dealt with on a global basis, we can’t have separate standards. But at the opposite extreme there are a whole raft of things which if we’re going to regain them, the value that we’re creating, the work that we’re doing, it’s going to be done in concert with people with whom we have an enduring relationship in a community of some sort.

Robert Theobald: You’ve raised at least three ones for me on this one. The first one’s nice and short. I was talking to a group of pastors, and I was bemoaning exactly the same pattern, that everything was becoming transactional and you didn’t pass things back and forth over the fence any more, and you know, everything in the community was becoming well, ‘I buy from you’, we don’t have pot lucks, we don’t do things just because they’re nice to do and money doesn’t get into it. We don’t have as much community fairs where everybody mucks in and you can’t possibly calculate. And I said, ‘You know, sooner or later we’re going to have catered church suppers.’ And they said, ‘That’s a great idea.’

Charles Brass: It take all the pressure off the pastor’s wife.

Robert Theobald: I don’t think that was the point I was trying to make.

The second point though, is the point about the Japanese culture, because westerners find doing business in Japan very difficult because it is a relationship business, it is not primarily a transactional business. And there’s a covenant more than a contract. And they say, ‘Well there’s no way we can cover everything in this contract; there’s no way we can get everything transactional, but we want to continue to work with each other, and as things change we will try to remain in a system that feels fair to all of us.’ That’s how to work. But it makes sense, it seems to me, of exactly what you’re saying, and of course westerners, (at least, I haven’t tried to do business in Japan) but from everything I hear, westerners go crazy because they can’t understand the framework in which that discussion is taking place.

But let me come to the third one, because it’s the one that I have just become particularly fascinated about because of some new learnings. And that is that I am finding that people in communities in sub neighbourhoods are just beginning to say ‘You will either give us more ability to make decisions about our lives, or we are going to make life very difficult for you. That we’re no longer willing to have city governments say “We make a decision for all of Melbourne, or all of LA, or all of even Spokane”, which is a much smaller city which is where I’m now living. And a friend of mine rang me up in great excitement from LA because he’d been reading my book, and he then fell across a very long article in The LA Times just the other day, which said neighbourhoods are threatening to secede from Los Angeles because they’re saying ‘We are not being given any freedom to make sense of our neighbourhoods.’

And when I worked in Spokane and had a long conversation in Spokane, we were amazed to find out how much is already happening to bring things down from the city level to the neighbourhood, to the family and to challenge what I think is core to this, which is that we’ve run on experts and professionals who have said, ‘We will do the work and we will tell you how to live your lives.’ And it seems to me that what we’re talking about is that people are going to have to learn to live their own lives, and that that’s a whole different set, and in a sense the whole piece we’ve done on education and health in these programs, and community, all ties in to that extraordinary issue that if it’s not going to be run from the top down, not going to be run by experts and professionals, people are going to have to know what their choices are and you don’t do that transactional.

Charles Brass: No, and since I know the other programs have focused on other things, if we concentrate on the work aspect of this: your comment about experts. Once upon a time, and it’s not that long ago, most of the knowledge in the world did reside with experts. That has changed. As we now see in the newspapers regularly, you can now build and buy almost anything across the Internet, whether it be good, bad or indifferent. So if you are a neighbourhood or a local community or even a group of people who don’t necessarily live near one another but who have some other bond, you’re no longer as reliant on those experts. Provided you can gain control over some significant parts of your life, because what most of us in cities have done is give away our capacity to provide almost anything for ourselves. We’ve become almost totally dependant on someone else to provide everything. To provide our food, to provide our electricity, to provide just about everything we use. And somewhere we’re going to need to use that knowledge to recapture a sense of ourselves but also some of the critical things, some of the work that we need to do, to be done in a way that we can provide for ourselves rather than relying on other people to provide for us.

Robert Theobald: Are things like well first of all, as you know of course, technology is making all of that more feasible, the potential of bringing things home again is very real. Do you see local currencies, the in a sense, the currency for a neighbourhood for example, as a way to do this, as a way to say, ‘Look we have things which we can create for each other and which because we’re using a local currency, will be in a sense, cheaper because we don’t have to buy national currency to do this.’ The other side of that of course is transactions, and we need to remember this. For busy people, transactions are wonderful. And that’s our problem. It’s easier to do transactions than relationships at one level.

Charles Brass: Absolutely.

Robert Theobald: It’s also destructive. And we have to recognise that their benefits to the relational model, and the relational work model, which go beyond the efficiency of the transactional model.

Charles Brass: Yes, like you said, we’re raising a lot of things in this conversation. It’s a very wide one.

Robert Theobald: Well that’s the purpose of these ones, I hope they’re going to like them.

Charles Brass: Oh good. With respect to currencies, I think the issue here is this question of the creation of value. One of the things that we’ve given away through this employment model, is any sense in which we as human beings, can create value. The only way we know how to create value, at least in theory, is that we start a business, and then you enter into economic transactions. And one of the reasons for that is that the representation of value that we use in our society is a national or an international currency. And one of the characteristics of that currency is that only a select group of people are able to make this stuff. You can’t just create it yourself, that’s called forgery, you go to jail. And so we’ve taken away from ourselves any belief that we can actually create value. And one of the things that local currencies do, (and I’m involved in some, and there are many examples in Australia and around the world), is they allow people in relationships with one another, to say ‘Hey, we think we’ve created some value here and that we can represent that value in some way.’ And then it is exchanged and traded among themselves. And it’s that capacity to create something that you can then eat. You don’t necessarily have to create your own food.

We talked earlier about at what point in the conversation do people feel good. Well it’s at about this point in the conversation, when people stop and they say, ‘Ah, you want us all to live on kibbutzes.’ Or, ‘You’re a closet Socialist.’ Well neither of those things are necessarily true. You don’t necessarily have to go back to the point where everybody’s creating their own food, but you need to be able to create something that allows you to eat. You can’t do that with Australian dollars. They’re created somewhere else, and there’s another whole hour-long program about how that stuff is created and distributed.

But because the economic world is ignoring so much of the real work that is done, and work that we believe is valuable, I think there is a huge opportunity here for people and communities and neighbourhoods to reclaim some of that, if you like under the very nose of the economic system, through local currencies.

Robert Theobald: And you know, you mentioned it doesn’t have to be food, but there is a profound sense I think in which shifting the food patterns is a part of this puzzle, that the neighbourhood garden – I have a friend who wanted to create a garden in New Orleans, and what that did to that neighbourhood was extraordinary. I mean first it produced food, but it produced a different sense of relationship to people, and it’s not a very good neighbourhood, it’s the sort of place where you would expect somebody to come in and rip off the garden, climb over the fence. I mean the fence isn’t unclimbable, and you know, one morning you’re going to wake up and find all the stuff’s gone.

Charles Brass: Nothing there.

Robert Theobald: But it doesn’t happen because something occurs in that neighbourhood, and the neighbourhood decides that they’re going to protect it. It’s the same thing with Block Watch, which is one of the most extraordinary phenomena to me, because it’s interesting who supports different models. The police might have said, ‘Well we don’t want our power to control the neighbourhoods taken away’, and what they said instead was, ‘We can’t police this place, and the only way this is going to happen is if you as a neighbourhood become part of the process by which you control your own neighbourhood.’

And it’s an incredibly subtle shift, but it seems to me to have gone a long way, and I like the way you’re talking about ‘if we can begin to say that relationships do create value and not everything’s transactional’ and a lot of the things that go on in the garden really, in a sense you can do that more efficiently, you can probably do it probably with less money, but making sense of your life is very different.

Charles Brass: That’s it. That’s it, it seems to me. I mean your phrase, a phrase I use almost every day of my life, for which I’m eternally grateful to you, the phrase ‘right livelihood’. Making sense of why it is we’re here, and certainly for me, it seemed to make little sense, much of what I was doing in the past. It only made sense if I believed that the money I was getting was going to get me something. And increasingly I and my colleagues were finding that yes we were getting money, but we weren’t able to do anything meaningful with it. And the things you’re describing around community gardens and all sorts of community programs, seem to me to go a long way towards not only getting work done, but providing that sense of why am I here? what’s my real purpose on this earth?

Robert Theobald: You know, one of the interesting things that one of the books suggests, is that if you think about money in terms of how long it takes you to make it, an awful lot of purchases suddenly seem pretty nonsensical. In other words, instead of saying ‘It’s going to cost me this amount of dollars’, you say ‘It’s going to take this amount of my life.’ Is it really worth that amount of my life to buy a hat, or to buy this new gimmick? And of course there’s all the other data which shows that consumption gives you a very short satisfaction hit. You know, you say, ‘It doesn’t last very long’. You buy the thing, and maybe you feel good about it for a couple of days or a week or a month, but for most people those things don’t really make their life better it seems to me. And that’s of course what advertising keeps on saying, ‘Well if you do this, your life will be complete’, but I don’t think many people really – and I think that’s the point you’re making, that money doesn’t buy happiness, and there’s all sorts of data beginning to come out about lots of money not doing much for you. Yes, you need a certain amount, but when people say, ‘Well you’re saying we’re going to do without money’ of course we’re not saying you can do without money, we’re saying that beyond a certain amount of money, you have to ask what it’s bringing you and what you’re paying for it.

Charles Brass: Yes. I’ll give you a small personal example. My Saturday afternoons used to involve starting up a lawnmower, mowing the lawn, and then when I’d finished because I was all hot and sweaty and because I was worried about becoming overweight, I’d go for a run, and take the dogs for a run.

Then the lawnmower broke down and we wandered in to the lawnmower buying shop and looked at various lawnmowers and saw a modern technologically developed push-pull lawnmower. And I went to a colleague I know who’s a personal trainer and I said, ‘Listen, do you reckon if I used a push-pull lawnmower on my lawn, and you gave me a couple of things to think about while I was doing it, I could get the same exercise as I would while I was running?’

He said, ‘Not only that, you’d do less damage to your body.’

So I now have a push-pull lawnmower, and as I’m mowing the lawn, I’m doing my exercise. I don’t need the $150 Nike runners to go running, I wear a grotty old pair that get green and dirty; I’m out in my yard mowing the lawn. Technology’s a significant part of this. The lawnmower that I use today would not have been able to have been bought in the 1950s, and push-pull lawnmowers weren’t capable of mowing the lawn. They now are. And instead of the typical economic world saying ‘You buy the biggest and the best lawnmower’, and maybe if I was being creative, I share it with my neighbour, I’m actually, I believe using technology to actually make my life more meaningful rather than just going through a series of tasks during the day.

Robert Theobald: I was actually going to push it out where you didn’t push it out, which is to say: And, if it’s that simple, maybe you can share it with your neighbour, with much less risk that it’s going to come back in a totally non-usable state. Because I mean, if you’ve got a very high tech thing, you’re not about to lend that because if it gets broken then where are you.

Charles Brass: That’s a good thought.

Robert Theobald: And then that opens up the whole question of how many lawnmowers do you need on a block, and one of the interesting things that’s happening in certain cities is how many cars do you need on a block. And people are beginning to find out that you can own cars jointly instead of everybody having a car which sits in the garage most of the time. Now it’s not simple, but again if you start thinking about what technology allows us to do and how far ahead we can book, and how much better we can get it using the time we have and the equipment so it’s used well. Let me give you one other crazy idea, which is we live with the concept of the weekend. We were talking about the whole 9 to 5 idea, but we still sort of keep the concept of the weekend. So we have the weekend, when everything is busy, all the recreation stuff. And you have the week when all the offices are full. Well supposing we said ‘That’s an outdated idea and we want to use our facilities much more evenly.’ Now everybody says ‘You can’t do that’. And I say, ‘Well, why not? Why can’t you rethink this and say “We have 365 days in the year, and it’s really stupid that some days everything is crowded, and some days things aren’t being used very much”.’

So it’s those sorts of conceptual leaps, it seems to me which then would allow you to think about work, and some people like working at night. I mean, it’s a nightmare for me, but some people actually enjoy working at night, and I couldn’t do that if you paid me. Well it paid me a lot.

Charles Brass: Well I’m glad you do. I’ll give you a real example Robert, again from my own neighbourhood, and I’m sure many of our listeners are suffering from the same problems that our local primary school is, and that is that the governments which have traditionally been responsible for education, are increasingly saying, ‘We’re going to put less and less resources in, and make you more and more responsible yourself for what goes on in the school.’

Now there are lots of protests, and I don’t for one minute want to suggest that I’m endorsing what the governments are doing, and certainly lots of people are complaining, and there probably is room for more resources to go in. But the other side of this is that what the governments have done in our school for example, is they have given the school community a million-dollar asset, and said, ‘It’s yours. Do with it what you like.’ And that million-dollar asset is utilised, as you’ve just pointed out, about 18% or 20% of the time. Now we’re just beginning to explore, given that they’ve said to us ‘It’s yours, do with it what you want’, what it might mean to utilise that asset. It’s a million dollars they’ve given us, and the school is slowly starting to think about some of the things you’ve just talked about, as a way of capturing our ability to take advantage of what the government thinks is a reduction, but for us it’s a bonus.

Robert Theobald: I love that, and in fact when we talked in Spokane just the other week, people were saying the schools are the natural organising process for the neighbourhood. That’s still typically the people there are within a geographical area, and they have some commonalities. They may have forgotten those commonalities, but they have them. I’ve done a lot of work with something called the Mott Foundation in this country, which has talked about how community schools could revolutionise the way we move if we recognise that you don’t use the schools for six hours a day only in school terms, etc. And as you say, it’s a huge facility.

Now if you started looking at churches. How often are they used? We don’t need more facilities, we just need to stop having boundaries which say work takes place in this sort of place, not in that sort of place etc. Now I think we’ve got about four minutes left: how do we? I think what we need to remind people of is that we have sort of broadened the issue out from work and we’ve said, ‘If you talk about employment all of these issues are sort of trivia’. Once you start getting it around and saying ‘We’re really interested in how the work of the culture takes place’ then there are all of these openings, and I think maybe we answer the question I asked earlier but not quite in the way I expected, which was what could we say to people who wanted to do something? We said, ‘Here are some ways we’ve begun to think about it. Probably you thought about it, but you haven’t thought it was feasible. Why don’t you get serious about what you’re thinking and your action is?’

Charles Brass: Yes, and I think before we finish, we ought to come back to something you raised along the same line, and that was the concept of retirement. The concept of retirement is a purely economic concept, and in fact it’s even an outdated economic concept because it arose at a time when people’s bodies were so badly abused by the work they were doing that they weren’t able to continue it in later life. Even that’s changed. Most of the work that people do now, they’re perfectly capable even in an economic sense, perfectly capable of doing it into the latter years of their life. But the real thing here, and it’s at the core of everything we’ve said, is that it’s people who have the capacity to make a contribution. It’s people who create the value, it’s the relationships between people that makes up a society, and there’s absolutely no reason why that has to stop on someone’s 65th birthday, and particularly in a community sense.

It seems to me crazy. One thing we haven’t learnt from our indigenous populations, and you know this is in your country as well, is that they have respect for their elders. They actually don’t think you’ve learnt anything until you’re 65. We think once you’ve hit 50 you’ve got nothing to contribute, it’s crazy.

Robert Theobald: You know, as we close this as it runs down, what fascinates me about our conversation is I think people would say, ‘Well, that’s not what we think the conversation about work is.’ That’s nice. Now I’ve got a different cut on maybe what people are saying when they say, ‘We need a new work vision.’ Does that make sense to you?

Charles Brass: Yes, I understand. You start talking about statistics like how many women there are in the workforce, and telecommuting, and working hours, and then you end up talking about education and community and lawnmowers. We seem to have come a long way. But it does seem to me it is about what we want done, together and collectively and individually. And that’s what work is. We’ve got a particular way of organising that called economic employment; are there some other ways we can organise it to give it a bit more meaning? The answer is yes, and the only question is, when are we going to do it?

Robert Theobald: And so let me leave you all with a question. How can each of you engage in changing the work patterns of our culture so that they provide satisfaction to you and also give access to a reasonable level of resources?

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