STEVE from GOLDEN AGE of GAIA has WRITTEN WONDERFUL PDF’S;
The Principles of Largescale Employment Projects – Part 1
Folks, I’m reposting this two-part series here because it flows with and out of the series “Why Few of Our Global Situations Seem to Work.” Most people will already have read it. I’d ask those who have to just pass on to the next article.
We may soon need to be thinking about how to fund or create projects so I’m reposting this two-part series, written in 1995, four years after I first became aware that automation was consuming work, jobs, and careers.
The hardest thing about being a financial wayshower can be knowing how to think about things. Hopefully this two-part series helps.
I’ve written a new booklet that draws together recent articles on creating global solutions. It’s available here: Resolving Global Problems through Context Creation
At a time when the bottom is falling out of the economy, when we’ve automated people out of work and shipped whatever jobs remained overseas, I think we need to seriously look at how to put our population back to work. The following principles may clarify, and can be adapted to, the work of creating largescale employment projects.
(1) Work is a Function of Unworkability
The first principle underlying the creation of largescale employment projects is that work is a function of unworkability.
If we think about it, workability is invisible and only unworkability is visible.
Any tool or machine that works usually doesn’t attract our attention. But the squeaky wheel does and it gets the grease.
My computer, as long as it works, receives little or no attention from me. However, the minute it ceases working, I swing into action, attempting to fix it myself or having it repaired or replacing it.
With the exception of preventive-maintenance programs, we usually do no other work on anything until it ceases to work; that is, until the situation becomes unworkable.
Therefore all largescale employment projects will in the first instance arise as the result of identifying a largescale instance of unworkability and then turning it into workability. There’s no lack of unworkability or “problems.” So there is no lack of work for our population.
Examples of largescale instances of unworkability include global famine, disease, pollution, illiteracy, homelessness, etc. Unemployment is not a function of a lack of work. It’s a function of a lack of means.
[And after the Reval, and later NESARA, there will be the means.]
(2) Value is a Function of Agreement
The second principle that I’d like to point to in the creation of largescale employment projects is that a change, solution, or opportunity, I believe, has value only because we say it has.
Take for example the case of nuclear missiles. To the best of my knowledge, every intercontinental ballistic missile that I’m aware of has only either sat in a silo or been launched up into the air to fall into the ocean.
[In fact we now know that no military on this planet has been allowed to explode a nuclear bomb with hostile intention since at least the 1950s.]
In fact ICBMs have value only because people regard them as valuable. They serve no direct useful function as, say, a car serves a function by transporting its passengers.
Some might say they serve the function of ensuring national security. I would argue to the contrary that they simply produce a condition of national insecurity. ICBMs have value only because we say they do.
Though they serve no direct useful function in the same way that a car does, they are still massively funded.
What this principle demonstrates to me is that a new solution or opportunity shouldn’t be measured in terms of fictitious ‘inherent’ value, but in terms of the value that we attach to it. If a country deems the ending of hunger and poverty within its boundaries as valuable, money will be found to end them.
This principle gives us permission to allow ourselves to explore unheard-of or unthinkable opportunities and to focus our attention on how to create agreement around value rather than looking for non-existent inherent value. I believe that value is not inherent in a thing or event. Like beauty, value is in the eye of the beholder.
(3) Alignment Requires Deadlines
A third principle is that the social alignment needed to create a largescale employment project requires targetable, society-wide deadlines. If we want alignment on a planetary scale, we cannot agree to accomplish our project “some day.” We must have a specific deadline to orchestrate the coordination involved.
Putting a man on the moon succeeded, all other things being equal, because President John F. Kennedy attached a deadline to it – the end of the Sixties. Had President Kennedy left the matter without a deadline, the necessary coordination of efforts might never have taken place and the goal might never have been achieved.
(4) Alignment Requires Win/Win, Global Solutions
A fourth principle in the creation of largescale employment projects is that win/lose solutions prevent alignment. Alignment is created with win/win solutions that leave no one out. Win/win solutions are global, contextual. They create no “us against them” divisions. They leave no residue.
Many society-wide solutions create as many problems as they solve. Their formulation creates new conflict. Their accomplishment transfers a burden from one shoulder to another. Their completion leaves a festering wound.
Social programs to fight crime, help minorities, or combat disease go on within a fragmented context, with some people left out of their scope, some people winning at other people’s expense, and some people, identified as the cause of the problem, being penalized or ostracized.
At the moment our global scene is riven with divisions. Blocs of nations, rich and poor, of varying religions and creeds oppose one another. Typically these days [1995], alignment is sought by justifying one’s own side and blaming the other.
Righting one imbalance or injustice at the cost of creating another will not create social alignment. Only global, win/win solutions to unworkability will win the degree of alignment that ensures success.
(Part 2 will be published Monday or you can read aheadat
http://goldenageofgaia.com/the-principles-of-largescale-employment-projects-part-22/.)
Footnotes
(1) I wrote politicians, labor leaders, anyone I could think of. No one listened. I think people were too fascinated with their computers to realize the tremendous stripping of employment and the turning of the job market into a buyer’s market that was soon to happen. Here is one article from 1998, published in the Toronto Globe and Mail. “If This is Your Job, Watch Out!” at
http://goldenageofgaia.com/accountability/automation/if-this-is-your-job-watch-out-1998/.
Equally ironic is that I collected probably the largest library of articles looking at how automation worked its way through the job market, collapsing firms, stripping entry-level jobs or any jobs that a computer could do, and ending entire careers. But when it came time to seek a library or archive for this collection, no institution was in the slightest bit interested. A phenomenon had just occurred that caused hardship to millions and ended forever the equitable workplace that we were building since the Fifties and not a person I knew or contacted had any interest in it.
The Principles of Largescale Employment Projects – Part 2
(Continued from Part 1.)
(5) The Resolution of Dissonance Creates Paradigmatic Breakthroughs
In the course of creating a largescale employment project, dissonance will arise. Disagreement may ensue. A scheme may be abandoned. But history shows numerous examples where dissonance has been the occasion, not for abandoning a scheme, but for creating a paradigmatic breakthrough.
Given the dissonance that may occur in our future, the need for mechanisms to bridge dissonance should be clear. If we’re looking for paradigmatic breakthroughs, we must find new ways of addressing dissonance.
I can’t think of an example of a social endeavor that illustrates this principle. In the course of my studies, I’ve only come across it in the resolution of personal dissonance but I’m willing to bet that the same principle can be applied to dissonance associated with largescale projects as well.
Here’s an example. Max Weber created a distinction considered fundamental to the field of sociology out of resolving an ongoing family dispute.
His father, a rabbi, met Weber’s sociological arguments with “unprovable” religious arguments, which Weber labelled ‘values.’ His own “provable” assertions he considered ‘facts’. By bridging the two, and contextualizing them within sociology, he created a division between facts and values that remained a basic distinction in the sociologist’s toolbox.
Another example: Benjamin Lee Whorf, before becoming an anthropologist, was a fire insurance investigator. He found that fires occurred because inaccurate linguistic labels led people to misunderstand a situation and take hazardous actions.
A worker would see an “empty” oil drum and drop a lit match into it, overlooking that it was full of flammable vapors. An office worker would throw a coat over a cone heater and turn on the “light” switch, not knowing that the switch activated the heater. When the light didn’t go on, after the worker toggled it several times, he’d assume that the “light” didn’t work, leaving the heater to blaze underneath his coat.
In the course of resolving these linguistic misconceptions, Whorf stumbled upon what has become known as the principle of linguistic relativity – that things are for us as we see and describe them.
Finally, Thomas Kuhn, working as a historian of science at a junior college, found the writers of outdated history texts touting their own age as the pinnacle of science, even though the age that succeeded it often discredited its science. Puzzled at how all eras could regard theirs as the height of attainment, when the science of their eras ultimately went nowhere, he arrived at the notion of temporocentrism – that people self-servingly represent their own as the best of all possible eras.
I realize that these examples don’t shed light on largescale enterprises, but I wish only to consider the principle that lies beneath them.
By offering solutions that bridge cognitive dissonance, instead of abandoning fruitful schemes, we create paradigmatic breakthroughs. Therefore, dissonance in our personal lives (or in our social projects) should be seen neither as a stumbling block nor as an occasion for choosing one side against the other, but as an occasion to recontextualize and bridge the dissonance.
We might therefore welcome paradox, confusion, double binds, dualisms, and the clash of opposites when they arise in the course of our social alignments and common endeavors.
(6) Critics Identify Their Own Expertise
A sixth principle in the creation of largescale employment projects encourages us to look at our critics
in a productive way.
Any genuinely new activity can’t be fully planned in advance. The answers to many of its problems are found in the course of accomplishing the project itself.
Critics will arise, some sincere, some not. The insincere we can pass by. But some critics are sincere and we may lose their expertise by dismissing them.
A more constructive response would be to see them as potential contributors, speaking from their own areas of experience and sometimes identifying important actions needing to be taken.
In the example of sending people to the moon, those who say that such-and-such a material won’t work probably could very well be indicating knowledge of materials that will.
This principle reminds us to turn the negative to our advantage and harness the energy of those who can foresee the problems that stand in our way.
*********
These are just some initial thoughts on the principles of projects that might put people back to work or address areas of the world’s unworkability. In the language we use today, they assist us in the building of Nova Earth.
I have in mind not some pharaoh’s use of slaves to build a monument and not some manipulation of the masses to serve a reigning social class. Rather, I have in mind ennobling cooperative endeavors in which all people of the world participate for the benefit of the planet. (I have on occasion called this the vision of a “cooperative commonwealth” and, after Werner Erhard, “a world that works for everyone.”)
To summarize, when we turn to addressing global famine, drought, poverty, homelessness, disease, infirmity, and inequality, the following principles may help us to frame an adequate, largescale response:
(1) Identifying areas of the world’s unworkability,
(2) Creating projects that express and reflect our values,
(3) Building alignment with win/win solutions,
(4) Setting targettable, society-wide deadlines that allow for project-wide coordination of efforts,
(5) Bridging dissonance and creating new paradigms,
(6) And asking our critics for their expertise.
I very well may have left many things out of consideration. If you see any, I welcome your contribution. This essay was not intended to end discussion, but to begin it.
saintandrewstwinflame 