Free the Earth Day

I need some feedback on an idea, my friends.  I have a potential solution to some of the many problems which face us as a global community.  I wouldn't even consider this a possibility if I hadn't personally witnessed the global communication and coordination that made Occupy occur simultaneously in 1600 cities in 80 countries around the world.

My idea is that simultaneously all around the world many people, on the same day, stop paying rent and stop paying their mortgage.  That we all declare that from today onwards our home is ours and that we no longer have to pay to live on the planet that we were born on.

The primary benefits, as I see it, are that economic disparity would be drastically leveled, the global economy would be severely damaged and many people would not only have a significant financial burden lifted, but would be able to actively pursue an increasingly money-free life from the base of having a secure home.

What do people I think?  I am curious both about what you think the consequences would be, and how this could become a succinct meme to be successful on a global stage.  The best meme structure I have so far constructed - I'm sure we can do better - is Free the Earth Day.  "From this day on the earth is free and we don't have to pay to live here anymore."

Feedback, my friends!

Saving the Third World from Poverty

The Third World is the same wherever we go. It is us First Worlders who have created the Third World, thanks to our evil plan of World Globalisation. Without rich consuming countries wanting more more more and therefore wanting to trade with every part of the world, much of what is now the Third World would simply have remained the world, or Planet Earth. To convince these Earthlings that they want our abstract little notes and coins, that they want to trade all of their precious resources for it, I guess first we have to teach them to envy us and our superior lifestyle and culture. Being “Christians” we sent Missionaries ahead to “convert” the Earthlings to our peculiar religion, appropriately worshipping a genocidal god, and had a lot of success. Being Consumers now we send Hollywood to convert the Earthlings to our modern, updated, secular religion, worshipping our new god, Economy. Unlike Jahweh, the Christian god, who is clearly genocidal in his official literature, Economy wants to wipe out all species on this planet, not just specific races of humans. Hollywood, it seems, has been far more successful than the Missionaries. As a result more people than ever, living as heathens, close to the land, are now living in poverty, perhaps because they suddenly have to pay for food, perhaps because their environment is becoming increasingly polluted as a result of industrialisation. Either way, they want cellphones, they want Coca-Cola and they want action movies. As I sign of their independence, they may even form their own centralised government, therefore becoming, like us, a country, and even making their own action movies with local actors and locations. As a continuation of their independence from the imperialism of global advertising corporations like Coca-Cola and McDonalds the may even develop their own soft drinks and takeaway chains, so the profits from diabetes, obesity and heart disease can stay in the local economy.

Having established a centralised authoritarian government that worships the Economy, they can now embrace their position in the world as Third and Poverty. Some heretics, living in small tribal groups in unity with nature, remain outside of the classifications of Third World and Poverty, but they are being worked on. A growing proportion of this exciting new country are now futilely striving to become First World, and therefore lose the final link they have with the environment they live in, the humans they share their environment with and even a full experience of their own bodies. Hollywood has been the great teacher for a century now, sending movies, television and pop music from Los Angeles to (almost) every corner of the world. The American Dream, now officially dead in all remotely intelligent discussions in America, is now the dream of all who worship Economy, who see it not as a dream but as a literal truth. Stable governments worshipping Economy and welcoming Globalisation are being deliberately spread, not for the sake of some ancient Greek philosophy, Demokratia, but for the sake of Trade in praise of Economy. We will never extract and consume all of the planet's resources if we focus only on First World Christian Capitalist countries.

It is noble, even necessary, to spread our way of life, with alienation and airports, bureaucracy and border patrols, concrete and carbon monoxide to the entire planet. By some anomalous miracle of green politics most world governments have agreed that Antarctica will not be exploited and is not even a country, though it has been tentatively drawn on to define which rich countries look after which pieces of mouth-wateringly immaculate virgin-white continent. The most empathetic and least money-obsessed among us even volunteer in poor poverty-stricken Third World “countries”, helping them “develop” their lives, environments, communities and bodies into something that can serve the Economy and so bring them a paper-thin slice of the money-pie. Meanwhile they are very quickly losing connection with thousands of years of cultural tradition, the way-of-life and unity with the environment that have successfully brought them here (when it is widely agreed that the Industrial Consumer way of life will definitely not last 1000 years or bring the human species into any recognisable future). While 100,000 years of folk medicinal knowledge is being lost forever in our lifetime, modern psychiatric drugs are spreading like a plague from the eastern United States of Amnesia.

Outside of the executive boardrooms of major corporations and the debate chambers of “secular” Capitalist Governments, we know that this progress may not be “good”, but we recognise that is it “inevitable”. That's how things are now. We can't go back to being Cave Men. We must all step into and live entirely within the Real World, and forget that anything else ever existed, because it didn't. It has always been like this and if it hasn't it was always leading up to this. It will always be like this and if it is unsustainable we will have to be unsustainable “Sustainably”.

My friends and I compare our Third World experiences in countries in Central America and South-East Asia, finding similarities in tropical fruits and tourist economies. “Everything is so cheap!” we exclaim with delight. Many of us travellers are peripheral beings in the West, but in the Third World we become white Messengers carrying wads of divinely-ordained money. We are seen as “rich” by the locals and are treated as such. They want what we have, though we have travelled halfway across the world to get away from it. All we have is this universally-recognised abstraction, currency, which is terrifyingly finite. We battle with the locals for possession of this abstraction and they blackmail and threaten us by withholding the resources they possess, food and shelter, exchanging them for our notes of abstraction, just as we taught them.

I am told that Guatemala is a very poor country. I found, upon flying into the United States of Anorexia, a profound paranoia and distrust. They suspected me of wanting to overstay in their free country and so questioned me and checked my documents for hours before allowing me to pass the border. Upon flying into Guatemala, with a long line of locals wanting to cross the border, they saw me, the tallest, richest, whitest person in the line, and waved me through. Come, stay, spend your money, enjoy our food and our women, they seemed to be saying. They tried to sell me bus tours and any number of contrived travel options inside the airport and, upon seeing me proudly stepping out into the hot air unencumbered by their expensive controlled holidays, gave me pitying looks. As soon as I stepped outside the doors of the airport I was leaped upon by thirty taxi drivers willing to take me anywhere. I did not choose one, somehow one of them chose me and led me away to his car, naming a price that sounded cheap until I realised it was in US dollars.

This was Guatemala City, the central temple of Economy in this “developing” country, and so I took the bus straight out of the city, to Cobán, less developed, more poor, more welcoming, more comprehensible, more “authentic”, cheaper, the great dream of the rich foreigner, able to buy anything in the poor naïve Third World town. In Cobán, my local town for six weeks, the streets are dirt and lined with women selling fruit and tortillas, men selling energy boosters and cigarettes. I would walk through the streets a perfect Gringo, with more money than Spanish. They would try to talk their prices up to much more than they usually charge, but, I slowly learned, could be talked back down to the normal price. I learned with my Canadian friend, who has good Spanish and is a social genius, that to break through the image of Rich Gringo is very easy. To make a joke, to give a compliment or to simply humble ourselves, we suddenly transmute in their eyes into a real person and they laugh with us and empathise with us as the strange foreigner in a difficult situation, and we are friends, sometimes family, and they don't even want to charge us. We found that if we ask for food, say we have no money, it will be given to us without second-thought. Money is secondary to everyone eating. I was surprised and confused by how much the large gathering of Westerners I met in Guatemala became obsessed with living as cheaply as possible and talking the price of everything down as low as possible. While it made me feel more confident to learn enough Spanish to facilitate commerce, it made me feel satisfied and comfortable to later learn enough Spanish to laugh and joke with bus drivers.

Outside Cobán many people don't even speak Spanish, the language of four-hundred years of Colonisation, Christianity and Capitalism. They live in small villages in a variety of relationships to their Mayan traditions. It amazed me the extent to which they have survived these centuries of Colonisation, while México is progressively polluted by America like a leaking landfill above them. We received visits from Mayan shaman women, who blessed our gathering with ceremonies around the fire. We brought our multi-cultural performance into their village and they all gathered around us in fascination of our strangeness. We received a lot of sun and a lot of rain and we discovered, upon digging toilets, that there is about two metres of topsoil. Consequently, there was plenty of food, not only tropical fruits but maize, their staple food and the central god of the Mayan cosmology. Everyone had bananas and wanted to give them to us in appreciation of meeting us. We weary travellers always appreciated a bunch of bananas to nourish and delight us. There was plenty of food, but every village had a tienda, a little shop selling candy, chips and softdrinks, and every tienda was painted with either a Coca-Cola or Pepsi logo. It seems, unless they take the collectivo into town, the tienda is the only place to spend money, and only on junk food. In the poor Mexican villages, the Mexican Mayans all seemed desperate to sell us anything to make a tiny amount of money. The Guatemalan Mayans, less advanced, were less interested in our money. But every day, as Cobán sucked us towards it, bus after bus was filled with perfumed young men and round old women also sucked into town for their chance of making money.

Despite what is often referred to as “Poverty”, there were cellphones everywhere, and the cellphones that we Westerners left lying in our tents tended to disappear. There were satellite dishes in the most obscurely-placed houses, all with the mark of the beast, the “Claro” logo, the huge central American cellphone corporation. Why would everybody in Guatemala want a cellphone? The advertising in Cobán was very aggressive. “Claro” logos were everywhere and constantly there were vans driving slowly through the narrow streets shouting through loudspeakers on their roofs advertising for everyone needing a cellphone. Desensitised and over-exposed to advertising, it just aggravated me. New to its power to manipulate and the novelty of advertising not being completely insidious in their environment, the locals surely responded conscientiously to the advertising.

It is such a relief for me, Western Consumer of New Zealand, distant outpost of the British Commonwealth, to not have a cellphone for a while, to not use it for a while. We rich Capitalists, dissatisfied with what our culture offers us, consumption, accumulation and entertainment as the meaning of life, travel all the way to Guatemala to gather together in the remote river valley of Rio Sachicha, to live together on the earth without commerce. Yet we are pulled over and over again to the urban centres to satiate our craving and buy something, anything, to have it and take it with us, not even caring if it is later stolen by some poor local. We exhaust ourselves in the exuberance and chaos of the Third World, we obtain their intestinal parasites, and we retreat home to our sterility and stupormarkets to recover from our loss of illusion-of-control.

We educated post-consumer hippies are confused and conflicted by the development of the Third World, by Guatemala, surviving 400 years of Colonisation, only to embrace Capitalism now. We want to support their development, we want to exploit their resources, their naïvety, their pure land and way-of-life and we want to leave them untouched, to maintain a life not defined by our failed institutions.

I guess we learn and we return to New Zealand and Canada and Finland with an experience that reverberates through our bodies, rather than media-produced images in our heads. We may not understand, but at least we don't pretend to understand. We may not reject Imperialistic Corporate Industrial Consumerism, but at least we worship the Economy with a disrespectful irony and sarcasm.

Paterson by Allen Ginsberg

What do I want in these rooms papered with visions of money?

How much can I make by cutting my hair? If I put new heels on my shoes,
bathe my body reeking of masturbation and sweat, layer upon layer of excrement
dried in employment bureaus, magazine hallways, statistical cubicles, factory stairways,
cloakrooms of the smiling gods of psychiatry;
if in antechambers I face the presumption of department store supervisory employees,
old clerks in their asylums of fat, the slobs and dumbbells of the ego with money and power
to hire and fire and make and break and fart and justify their reality of wrath and rumor of wrath to wrath-weary man,
what war I enter and for what a prize! the dead prick of commonplace obsession,
harridan vision of electricity at night and daylight misery of thumb-sucking rage.

I would rather go mad, gone down the dark road to Mexico, heroin dripping in my veins,
eyes and ears full of marijuana,
eating the god Peyote on the floor of a mudhut on the border
or laying in a hotel room over the body of some suffering man or woman;
rather jar my body down the road, crying by a diner in the Western sun;
rather crawl on my naked belly over the tincans of Cincinnati;
rather drag a rotten railroad tie to a Golgotha in the Rockies;
rather, crowned with thorns in Galveston, nailed hand and foot in Los Angeles, raised up to die in Denver,
pierced in the side in Chicago, perished and tombed in New Orleans and resurrected in 1958 somewhere on Garret Mountain,
come down roaring in a blaze of hot cars and garbage,
streetcorner Evangel in front of City I-Tall, surrounded by statues of agonized lions,
with a mouthful of shit, and the hair rising on my scalp,
screaming and dancing in praise of Eternity annihilating the sidewalk, annihilating reality,
screaming and dancing against the orchestra in the destructible ballroom of the world,
blood streaming from my belly and shoulders
flooding the city with its hideous ecstasy, rolling over the pavements and highways
by the bayoux and forests and derricks leaving my flesh and my bones hanging on the trees.

Nature is the centre of the mandala

In the city, I feel guilty for not being productive.  I feel guilty for turning off my cellphone and neglecting my urban responsibilities.

Money buys everything

Walking home with his friend Tyler one evening they stop at the ATM right outside his house, cos Tyler needs some cash.  They both notice at the same time a couple of small notes left by the last person and they both reach for them.  Tyler hesitates however and he gets to them first.  There is another abandoned note and Tyler takes that one.

All night at this party the two of them had been speaking to this beautiful Indian woman called Lakshmi.  Tyler was clearly into her, but he was very much into Tyler.  But Tyler kept playing the heterosexual game, as he saw it.  They left the party together though, but of course Tyler will not be sleeping in his bed, but prefers the floor or the couch.

But, as it turns out, this is not just a couple of small notes.  The ATM sits in front of them with a huge wad of $100 notes, as if it is the most casual thing possible.  Tyler sees the notes, sees him grab the notes, and runs away without saying a word.  He takes the handful of $100 notes and another wad comes straight out.  He takes that wad and there is another one.  He stuffs the money up his shirt, more and more, as much as he can carry.  With each additional handful of $100 notes his excitement and panic increase until he can't take any more money, he is in a state of paranoia, there is still money sitting calmly in the ATM and he is in his bedroom with a tall pile of money covered in a blanket and he can hear his flatmates coming home and he doesn't want them to see it.  He wonders whether he will get caught; he can't put the money in the bank, they'll recognise the serial numbers, ATMs have cameras, will he get caught, will he get away with it.  He could go to the Police and give all the money back (he knows he won't do that) but he has to act quickly.

Employment for the accumulation of economic benefits

To get the job you first must learn the language.  We understand that there is a special language associated only with job descriptions and job applications and this language must be mastered.  Despite how you might feel about the strange and confusing nature of this language it actually makes the entire process much more honest.  Nobody speaks this language, although there are many individuals involved in recruitment who are fluent in it.  It is not a language that in any way enables human expression, which almost every other language on the planet it designed for.  What it does make perfectly clear, however, is the first thing required of you if you would like to fit this position; repress your natural flow of expression.  It is not appropriate and it is not acceptable.  What would be truly inhuman is if we provided a warm and friendly interview process and a job description that is lucid and in the native language of the writer and the reader.  This would be inhuman because we then need to proceed to the workplace where this type of warmth and normality is completely unacceptable and the role we are paying you to perform is the only acceptable presence.  We adhere to this recruitment method because we do not want to become swept up in the natural process of the universe in which the right person comes to us at the right time.  Submitting to this process not only undermines our ability to control as much as possible of our business and the people associated with it but it also leaves us open for problematic and unnecessary developments and evolutions in the culture of our company.  It is important that we continue to provide a consistent unchanging service to our shareholders.  We all need money in this world.  One cannot live without money, and so we must do what is required to make this money that we need to remain alive.  We must submit to the will of the employer, who after all is only submitting to the will of her employer.  To be profound for a moment we must in fact submit to the will of employment itself.  We are human and nothing is more human than employment.  It has become the natural way and will now always be the natural way of humanity.  To be initiated as an adult one must seek, submit and adhere to employment for the duration of one's adulthood.  This is responsibility.  This is maturity.  And of course the economy is our secular god though we don't need to talk about that it does not pay to think about these things.  Now is the time, brothers and sisters, to release yourself to employment for the accumulation of economic benefits.

The Post-Economic Environment

I am an optimist.  I don't intend to be that way, that's just how it turns out.  I am intelligent and I think a lot about things and optimism just makes sense to me.  I could enslave myself within a life that does not support, enrich or excite me, that would surely defeat my optimism, but I'm not interested.  Instead I live the life that offers me the most value, the most beautiful present and the most exciting future. 

I am dismayed sometimes by abstract institutions like economy, but any brief analysis of the economy clearly highlights its perilous position.  This is why I am an optimist.  It is obvious that the economy will collapse.  This is inevitable.  The economy is only programmed for one thing: growth at the expense of all else; it is willing to take out anything for this purpose, including itself.  It has collapsed before, under its own weight and too many layers of abstraction; only last year in fact it was artificially supported by large influxes of money from the governments.  It will happen again and it will happen worse and maybe this time the governments won't have enough money to pump into it to stop the middle sinking in like a disturbed cake that will never rise again. 

I know this all sounds very optimistic; the economy will survive, you say, it will come back and be strong again.  Whether I have explained my reasons well or not I think that it won't.  I think that very soon we will enter a Post-Economic Environment in which different lifestyles will predominate.  The rich will realise suddenly that they no longer have any power whatsoever and that in fact all along they have been completely dependent because now they have no idea how to look after themselves.  Like only the infants in the animal kingdom they have no idea how to feed themselves.  However, the poor who live off the earth, who eat from the soil and from the trees and from the ocean, will have the power over their own lives that the rich have lost.  As Jesus and Bob Dylan said, "Many who are first will be last, and the last will be first." 

I guess the times are changing and in this post-economic environment we will take the emphasis off the abstraction of money and place importance on resources.  How could greed exist in this environment?  There is of course never enough money, but in the post-economic environment we realise that the reality of our resources is abundance.  One family with one tree are abundant in apples.  One man with one fishing rod who loves to fish all day is abundant in fish.  Anybody with a house is abundant in shelter and rather than protect her house from the others, who need to steal to get more money, she is able to share her space with anyone who offers consideration and friendship in return.  This is a gift economy where generosity is the normal reaction, rather than greed, because there is too much.  The only indication of wealth is of course how much you have to give away.  And the result is not anxiety at the possibility of loss, but the comfort of friendship and the knowledge that even if you lose everything there will be someone nearby to offer you a meal and a warm bed; and maybe even some love. 

As an optimist, I don't see this as a future possibility, I see this as a present reality.  And it seems to be growing exponentially, as is the economy, but one sustains life and one restricts life, one is sustainable and one is unsustainable.  Only time and your actions will tell which is which.