On returning to the United States after two months in Asia—Japan, Ceylon, and Thailand—I am conscious of a marked and dangerous swelling of the national paranoia. Even flower-children are beginning to talk of violent reprisal against the increasing apoplexy of the police and the up-tight establishment. There is a gathering storm of sheer rage in which almost every important political group from the Birchers to the New Left is fascinated with the forces which it hates, and is bereft of psychic energy for any constructive action. Apart from a few high dreamers like Buckminster Fuller, Robert Theobald, Lewis Mumford, and Marshall McLuhan, no one seems to realize that an entirely new world is technically possible in a very near future—a world in which fascism and communism, capitalist war-economy and socialist leveling, poverty and taxation, overcrowded cities and rush-hours, and the necessity to earn a living by drudgery become entirely unnecessary. This wholly possible “utopia” is the only alternative to that total blackout of mankind for which we are now heading. A mutual massacre of scapegoats!
Perhaps some hippies, the real spiritual-type dropouts, have a contribution in preparing themselves for the leisure society—but their back-to-the-soil and arty-crafty notions of an economy are both sentimental and dangerous. To push back technology is to let millions starve. But the technology which hippies resent—the industrial slums, the smogged skies, the freeways, the piles of massed-produced junk, and the continued tuffing of our constipated cornucopia of useless or unused “products”—all this is simply obsolete. That most people are unaware of this plain physical fact is because our supposedly “materialistic” civilization is hypnotized, clobbered, stoned, and asphyxiated in a poisonous cloud of pure abstraction—of symbols, concepts, and institutions which have no further relation to the material world of nature.
Materially, we have created an electronic, computerized, and automated technology which is capable of handling almost every type of drudgery from accounting to digging ditches. It is capable of producing the basic necessities of food, clothing, housing, and utilities in unbelievable abundance. Yet instead of letting it go ahead full blast, we let it create a problem of “unemployment,” and squander most of its energies on making ever more satanic engines of war—because we are too stupid and deluded to cooperate in any large social project except under the stimulus of terror. Only the Big Bogey of communism can force the public to fork out enough taxes and the government to increase the national debt sufficiently to keep the economy running.
Hasn’t anyone heard? Taxation became obsolete with top hats and hansom cabs, and money is a reality of exactly the same type as meters, hours, and grams. Our divorce from the material and physical world is so complete that we don’t know the difference between money and wealth. Remember the Great Depression?—when, despite the material resources of the industrial world, the economy collapsed for lack of money, for lack of the power to purchase what industry could produce. Sorry, chum, you can’t build that house today. Not enough inches to go around. Yes, just plain inches. Not inches of wood or metal. Not even tape-measures. Simply a slump in inches as such.
There is is—concisely, without the many technical details which a handful of economists have already worked out. Capitalism, the obsession of making money, and socialism, the project of robbing the rich to pay the poor, are alike forms of the delusion that money is wealth, and belong to the pre-technological and pre-electronic age. Yet, in this country, not one single major political party—left or right—has any notion of putting such a scheme into practice.
Even on the basis of our current use of money, it does not seem to have entered the heads of our menu-eating politicians that all the energy and treasure spent on war since 1914 could have provided every human being on Earth with a life of comfortable luxury. Yet apparently we would rather have dollars than fine food or clothes, the “true” religion rather than the kingdom of heaven on Earth, the “right” ideology rather than healthy populations, and seem to derive much, much more pleasure from hating and plotting against our imaginary scapegoats than from enjoying the riches of the Earth.
Today, an effective revolution of the young-minded can be neither of the left, of the right, nor of the middle. These are merely the standpoints in a political debate which has no further relevance to facts. We must create a total diversion from the war of ideologies and from this obsessive scrambling for poker-chips mistaken for wealth. But it is not enough to drop out, don beads, and chant mantras (not that there’s anything against that in an age of leisure), for the expansion of consciousness must, at the very least, involve the liberation of our heads from this bodiless, bloodless, and obsolete world of abstractions which we mistake for our natural universe.
It is in this sense that we must get out of our minds to come to our senses—where “mind” signifies the confusion of words with meaning, menu with dinner, money with wealth, ego-personality with living organism, marriage with love, and law with order. All these abstractions are social institutions or conventions which are useful only so long as they are seen for what they are. This is the kind of vision of which the prophet said, “Where there is no vision the people perish”—and how appallingly true this is, not only of the United States but also of most civilized countries, at the immediate moment. For the most part, even the Underground Press is an outlet for horror stories and protests, allowing only fragments of space to woo men from their follies by describing the exuberant style of life which we could begin living today. If only we could open our eyes to what politicians and preachers call “hard” facts and “down-to-earth” realities—we should be as happy as larks.