Socratic Conversation Essay Example

Socratic Conversation Essay Socratic conversation—discussing this in the style of philosophers with hypothetical conversations and monologues. As we drive away from the Jacque Fresco lecture that I made my father, an evolutionary scientist, attend, he frowns and squints through the rain, preparing to say something but never saying it. Q) I’m sorry. He mutters finnally. Q) It’s just when they start talking about no money, that’s when they’ve lost me. I decide to take the approach that works. It’s going to be a long commute. A) You’ve seen the film Dad, we’ve talked before. Q) *grunt* A) Now†¦ Pretend you’re already in a global resource based economy, all that this entails, and remember this means we’ve done away with money and a system based upon this: a monetary system. Q) Who’s going to build my house? A) It isn’t who, but how. This sentence is the true question, your question is a very timely one that is completely limited to the state of technology and knowledge it came from. We don’t pay the ice man to come to our homes anymore, we don’t do this because we freeze water ourselves. ‘Who’s going to freeze my ice? ’ No-one. Q) Well yes, through a freezer that you have to buy. We will write a custom essay sample on Socratic Conversation specifically for you for only $16.38 $13.9/page Order now We will write a custom essay sample on Socratic Conversation specifically for you FOR ONLY $16.38 $13.9/page Hire Writer We will write a custom essay sample on Socratic Conversation specifically for you FOR ONLY $16.38 $13.9/page Hire Writer So how? You can’t pay the builder, so how? A) We do this via systems engineering. Pre-fab living spaces are built in half an hour with extrusion technology in a home that’s built as a single unit. Gone are the days of bricks and mortar. You could always build it out of choice. Ultimately when you study this particular aspect of Fresco’s ideas, it becomes quite clear that when it comes to living in such an environment, homes would be built with minimum of risk, maximization of efficiency of materials, easily, quickly, and very much personalized. Q) Fine, but who pays for this process? A) The premise of this exercise was first to assume we live in a non-monetary, Resource Based Economy, but if you want to discuss how we evolved towards this we can discuss that. Needless to say, this is a very different world from the one you and I inhabit now. We live in a world where the primary mechanism is the mechanism of profit. This drives our society now, it won’t in the future. The profit motive actually retards the progress f technology, as well as other aspects of human social wellbeing, creates endless waste, inefficiency, planned obsolescence, and compromises individuals and aggregate institutions (corporations, etc) to pursue profit without regard to the human and environmental consequences, without regard to its relevance to the actual operations and processes of the planet, its relevance to enhancing the lives of men, and gears the true innovative powers of humans towards exactly that: turning a profit. This is where the majority of current ‘innovations’ occur at present. It is an abhorrent system, mechanism, and state that we live in. The profit motive as a driving mechanism of society, rather than the scientific method, will eventually be the end of us. You know this. This is the problem, this is the pivotal cause—the cause of wars, indifference to certain catastrophes and genocides, to mass pollution, mass over population in tiny spaces when we have ample room, planned obsolescence, plundering the planet, destroying natural habitats irrevocably, leeching off of entire ecosystems until we have sucked them dry like a virus, which we have done with Mediterranean fisheries, homelessness, people being denied healthcare, loosing their livelihoods, terrible standards of living, 1 billion starving, people forced to work in mindless, stressful, endless jobs, and on, and on. It compromises science, technology, medicine, people, the environment, as well as things that will one day be irrelevant, such as traditional politics. Let me say the previous point again, and really try to make it as apparent to you as it should be: our current driving mechanism in global society is the mechanism of profit, not the scientific method. We will discuss that later, needless to say, very few people have ever stopped to consider this. You are a scientist. Really stop and think about that when you have some time. Q) Fine, can you tell me how we get to this, though? I don’t hear a lot of that. A) Here we go. It’s both simple and complicated, and, if one is a pessimist, we may not get there. As technology evolves, as with our understanding, goods and services will continually be automated and cybernated. This process is ongoing and the trend will continue whether you like it or not. Goods and services will continually be made more efficient, more productive, and available at lower and lower costs: through the work of engineers and technicians, and essentially the application of the scientific method toward particular problem solving (the problems in this context are framed within the monetary ystem—the problems of increasing productivity, and lowering costs). At our current state, this process was born solely in order to provide goods and services at a cheaper, faster rate for the producer. He could now build 10 toy horses in the time it took to make 1, with half the employees. Two things give a product or service value: the labor involved, and the scarcity of the resources employed. Where is the value in a letter I write to you? The limited trees, processed into paper are the resource, and the man carrying it to you is the labor. What about an email? There is no resource, it is binary code in ones and zeros, and is no longer relevant within this very framework. There is no labor, lest we decide to anthropomorphize the digital process and pay the code for arranging itself on your screen. Incidentally, this email I sent you was free. No scarce, withheld resource, no labor. It is free. Please understand this relationship. As this occurs with more and more things, the economic meltdown of this system is kept on a constant heat. You once had the majority of the labor force in agriculture, but this was phased out with high degrees of automation and more efficient farming: cotton was once entirely picked by people, now, in industrialized countries, it is entirely automated. In western countries, the labor force flocked to the industrial production centre. This ended when mass, more productive and efficient and cheaper mechanical automation took over in all aspects. Machines making machines. Would have sounded too fanciful 100 years ago, but this is the case ubiquitously. The population in countries like the US and Britain were forced to find new work, and what occurred was a mass flock to the service sector. Without this the masses would have been jobless, and the economy would have completely foundered. Now, this sector represents the overwhelming majority of the labor force. And this sector is falling prey to technological unemployment dramatically. The invention of automated bank tellers, which we call ATMs, has phased out the majority’s use of tellers as a means of banking, combined with its cybernation on the internet, where internet banking and phone banking, conducted with automated phone-banking systems, sees next to zero need for human employees. The phone service aspect of the sector is dancing in its own grave. It is all automated at this point. There are no needs for secretaries to do this anymore, and the entire industry is getting rid of them one by one. The internet has redefined retail. It is systematically putting many ace-to-face businesses out of business and on shaky grounds. Digitized media have crippled the music, film and software industries irrevocably. Not many children now, who you have to understand are more tuned into this than you and I, pay for their music, movies, games or software. It is all stored on binary code, which is totally abundant, should be free, and is infinitely copy-able and dist ributed and even altered. I could give many examples, as a last one I will say that my local supermarket is automated. I don’t buy from checkout counter girls, I go to an automated checkout and do it myself. Q) It’ll put the people behind it out of work. A) That’s my overall point. This is a process of phasing out human labor, so absolutely, yes. This is the highest form of efficiency available and possible—technology and what we can make of it. It is not good for the monetary system. But it is the most efficient, productive, and faster moving. Can you understand and appreciate this relationship? Our own social evolution has birthed this, and it is now taking the baton and running with it, exponentially faster, eventually leaving outmoded institutions in the dust. It is already in direct competition with human labor, jobs, and the less efficient market system itself. Future generations will understand this fact, it will be abundantly clear to them. The monetary system is reaching a cancerous stage, is structurally paralyzing at this point, and is a hindrance to social and technological progress. Q) And this process will lead to a resource based, non-money based economy? A) It is part of the process, a very important part. Q) Don’t you think the solution is just to improve the structure of the system? Go back to the gold standard, reign in the bankers, have more transparency, and so on? A) Let’s nip this in the bud. If you assassinated Rockefeller, disbanded the secret societies people fear, reintroduced the gold standard, hanged the bankers and danced with the Ewoks at the end of Return of the Jedi, this thing of ours would continue, unabated, on its trajectory of strategic dominance, acquisition, and conquering, and following that single powerful driving mechanism of profit. All of the problems discussed and that we will continue to discuss in this conversation will be inherent and will continue unabated. It will not solve the problems to, for instance, bring back the gold standard. This will be a very temporary measure to help in certain aspects, a band aid. It is not about patching holes in a box that is inherently flawed, it is not about placing some ointment on a cancerous growth and handing the patient back his pack of cigarettes, it is about realizing the entire system is built on foundations of clay. We will still have a totally flawed, unsustainable, self-destructive, exploitative, maladaptive, socially and technologically retarding system that creates incentives for corruption, wars, inefficiency, denying key goods and services, that plunders the planet with no reference to natural processes, laws, and what is available. It is still an infinite growth paradigm, on a finite world. It is still monumentally stupid, and primitive. Our arguments are far more sophisticated and fundamental than saying ‘if only we could return to the gold standard’, or ‘if only we could stick the bankers with harsher laws’. Monopolies, oligarchs, corruption, domination of resources, exploitation of labor, massive-scale corprotocracy projects—these things are all products of socio-economic evolution within the monetary paradigm. They are born from this. Any such measure as the gold standard or particular auditing laws, and so on, will not stop this inherent nature of this system. Q) Moving on, because you have not yet satisfactorily answered this. How can something be made for free? A) It is possible to produce something with such efficiency that its monetary value is next to nothing, undermining the monetary economy and the incentive to charge and even do it: it requires the automated process to have no forced human labor, no scarce resources, and to be designed in such a way that breakdown, rather than being inherent as it is in our current cheap shoddy, planned obsolescence products that are built to be bought and sold for profit, would have a truly maximized lifespan, truly efficient function and use of power, and eventually self-repairing, just as our own bodies are. Q) Self-repairing machines? Hmm†¦ A) And this is an important point actually: such a society is holistically designed and built on the same premise as an organism like the human body: it does not compete with itself, undercut itself and it is connected through a central nervous system. This is what is meant by a ‘systems approach’ and that’s complex so no need to delve into that right now. Cities and societies of the future, as technical creations, will resemble something closer to an organism, or a cell, than the inefficient, entropic entities we exist in today. What we have now, forget these terms we’ve all been brainwashed with—Capitalism, freedom, democracy, ‘free trade’—this is what it is. Ready? It is conquering. It is a big, grand system based on conquering, not freedom: conquering. We do it on main street, Wall Street, between companies, corporations, countries, everywhere and everyday. We compete for wealth, conquer, and take it. And we convince ourselves and other that we are somehow ‘free’ that we think it’s the right way to be, and that we are civilized. To recap and emphasize my previous point, which I want you to internalize, through automation and cybernation, goods and services will continually be made more and more productively with increasingly lower costs, and its value goes down in correlation. In fact, true peak efficiency in the creation of something renders it valueless in a monetary system, such as communication (this has already occurred). With this constant march of technology, the phenomenon of technological unemployment and the decreasing cost and hence value of production and services, we will be left with a social dilemma of enormous proportions. Technological evolution is in direct competition with the monetary system, and hence this current system of allocating goods and services is in competition with progress itself. It will implode in this fashion. It will only be able to maintain itself, as it has done, through cyclical consumption and hence will require the steady employment of most of the population. However, technological unemployment will continually phase out the latter, which will in turn drastically undercut the former. And hence, an economic and social breakdown will commence, as it has been doing. Not only can the planet not sustain such a system, but the system cannot even maintain itself. This is what happens in reality, things change and move on into new paradigms. Once the system’s integrity is really compromised like this, a necessary shift to something like a Resource Based Economy will be needed. Or we can do to ourselves what the Easter Islanders did. And finally on this note, the process of the global monetary system is set up in such a way, and evolves as such, that it pulls wealth and ownership and hence power into the hands of the few. But make no mistake, it isn’t an evil cabal of devil worshiping bankers, or that Rockefeller sold his soul or a ‘New World Order’ elite who plan secretly from a castle in Bulgaria to dominate the planet. The existence and persistence of a very small sector of society having most of the wealth and hence power is an end result of the way the very system operates. It is a system of dominance and conquering, the bigger shark swallowing the smaller shark. Monopoly is the success story and end result of ‘capitalism’ and money invariably ends in the hands of the few who own most of the world’s land, wealth, and resources. This is a sinister system, and the issues raised by people like John Perkins, are people and organizations simply following the profit motive. Q) Fair enough, I’m aware of that. But right now people still need jobs. A) Please ask yourself this question, should the focus of society be to create and maintain jobs, or to maximize productivity and create abundance? I hope it becomes increasingly clear to you that we cannot and will not have both. The more automation occurs, the more productivity and unemployment occurs. Why has this occurred? Q) Why has automation and that kind of stuff occurred, to build things faster, more efficiently, and cheaper? A) To make more money. Yes. This is the reason it was done in a monetary, profit incentive-based system. But, ironically, it has and will put so many people out of work, and birth higher forms of technology, which it will undercut the very system it emerged from. Please appreciate that with this fact, we belong to a system that is in direct competition with higher productivity and efficiency. That we are in competition, as humans, with machines. But, wait a minute, how ridiculous can you get? We shouldn’t be in competition with machines. That’s preposterous and the more I think about it, the more irritated I am that I was born now and not, say, 300 years from now. Automation is the emancipation proclamation for the human species. Gone are the days of having to march miles to fetch dirty water, toiling in a cotton field, and any other form of servitude for subsistence or money. Q) Yes but it is a problem, because we don’t have that job as an opportunity to make money anymore once it is automated. A) Yes, it is a problem in this system. But it isn’t a problem if it is freeing humans up from monotonous labor. That task is now done by a more productive, faster, drone. And you are not a drone. You should never be knee high in filth in a sewer, your whole damn life, you should never be leaning into an iron ore furnace, supplying it with raw materials, you should never be doing such a thing when we have the technology for an actual drone to do it. When you have an elevator man, who used to crank those levers to make the elevator go up and down, and technology saw to it that all you needed to do was walk in and press a button, the ‘elevator man’ as a job was phased out. Now that’s a problem for him, because he still needs monetary units to survive. When a dangerous British industrial cloth-making factory fazes out the (many missing digits) children from the factory floor with machines, they should be better off, yet what the fuck do they leave it for? They need and don’t have money, and hence are left hungry, homeless, and desperate. When a machine processes cotton with zero human labor, the cotton pickers have a problem, because they need money to have a dignified life. But what is the real problem here? Have you spotted it yet? You cannot stop technology. We are doing our best, to limit it’s use in all sectors, to maintain energy infrastructures that are retarding progress and are dangerous and outmoded, God knows we are trying, but we cannot stop it. And why would anyone want to? Why? Why stop a machine from cleaning disgusting sewers? Why stop an automated factory from producing the pipes for that sewer? Why stop a drone from harvesting cotton all its long life? Because we exist in something called a monetary system. This will be studied by future generations with interest. You believe, and so does the majority of this planet, that automation and cybernation is a bad thing in a major way. Q) I don’t, really. A) In so many words you’ve admitted that you do, though I’m convinced not with complete conviction. The monetary system is the real problem, because when you’ve been freed up from picking cotton, standing at a checkout, working in a factory, you aren’t actually free—you need to pool what we call money from the circulating supply. Without this, you won’t have electricity, food, water, or a shelter. We’ve invented electricity scientifically, but you won’t have it without first having money. We’ve invented clean, abundant tap water, but you won’t have it easily without first getting money for a shelter. Fewer and fewer jobs exist as more and more and more of them are phased out and automated. Q) So you’re saying the system will collapse, essentially? A) I’m saying that’s very possible, and also I want to drill this point in that it isn’t automation that’s the problem, it’s the economic system. It’s very simple. How much unemployment can a place have and absorb efore the integrity of the system is undermined? 40%? 50%? 60%? Q) I agree that the system will self-destruct in many ways. But I don’t really see this other option as working. A) Well, that’s because you haven’t lived in it. I think you would like it. Q) But something will always have some kind of monetary value, no matter how efficient. A) From the perspective of the producer (though they do not likely understand this consciously), true efficiency—true peak efficiency—of the production of something will render it valueless in a monetary system, as I said. The digitized medium birthed by computers is so efficient that it cannot be priced without first forcing artificial barriers and limits on the movie, music, software or website. Youtube and Wikipedia are totally free, as is the PDF of any given paper, but to make it have a monetary value now we will have to restrict the technology, introduce passwords we only give to ‘paying customers’, and create laws and imprison people for breaking them. What would this be? What would this action, this turn of events, really be? Except the un-knowing participation in the self-preservation of the current monetary paradigm, and the current status quo. You have to understand that, ultimately, change is the only constant: mountains rise and fall, the Universe ever expands, organisms live and die, organisms evolve, societies change and evolve, technology is exponentially moving on, etc. And eventually, come what may, the monetary system, and by this I mean the use of money in the creation and distribution of goods and services, is ultimately in direct competition with technological progress. This is because it is ultimately a false institution—one that will seek to preserve itself to no end. It was a necessary aspect of human social evolution, but to assume it is the apex of human achievement, and will always be here, is nothing less than utopian. Q) As I said, not everything can be free though because not everything is actually abundant. A) To move into a resource based global economy would require declaring the world’s resources the common heritage of all of humanity. We would need to do a global resource survey, which has never been done. There are some things that are comparatively scarce, maybe some kind of mineral that we extract an element from to make touch screens. The aim is to use science and technology to create abundance, not target scarcity for money. This does not mean going without. This is what occurs right now. So, imagine we only had enough of a resource to create 100 state of the art touch screens. This isn’t true by the way, but imagine. Our aim is what? To hoard that resource, like a squirrel, and make those 100 touch screens, and sell them to the highest bidder? No. What a petty, primitive solution to that problem. The challenge is to produce touch screens and hence we will seek solutions that do not use this resource, or that artificially recreates this resource. This is not an incentive now. The incentive is to maintain scarcity. It’s why OPEC exists, why we burn and hoard diamonds, and create the notion that something is scarce. That will be the challenge of the future, how to create abundance, not maintain scarcity—we’ve got it the wrong way around. Q) So we will all be wallowing in 7 acre mansions, with golden limousines and leer jets, having everything in abundance and for free?! A) Of course not. Q) So it would not really be possible to have this society then would it? A) Let me make this very clear. It absolutely would not be possible, desirable, or anything less than disgusting to have such an attempted world. Ironically, this is what we are aspiring towards collectively now, and this premise is so far removed from the tenets and ideas of a resource based economy that you may as well ask if we’ll all be Paris Hilton in such a society. Q) But you said everything would be free, and in abundance. A) Bear with me. The system we live under now is built upon the premise of infinite growth. This occurs under a finite planet. It is in direct empirical contention with the way things actually work, the resources of the planet, and its symbiotic processes that we are wholly reliant upon. It cannot work. It is doomed to fail, fail us, or transition to a different paradigm eventually. We cannot plunder the planet for corporate profit endlessly. This is the model our emerging modern human society has built itself upon, and it cannot continue indefinitely. Do you appreciate the starkness of this fact? If you were an Easter Islander, would you eschew these comments? If you were on the Titanic, would you search for lifeboats, tell me to piss off, or fall on your knees and start praying? The paradigm of infinite growth is not possible. It is in conflict with natural law. Constant, endless consumption for profit is doomed to fail. It will be subordinated by the prevailing laws I am referencing. It is a false system, this is what is meant by that statement. No we cannot all have the Donald Trump existence. This is a profoundly ego driven value to aspire towards, and is the product of human ignorance, not inspiration, not innovation, nor knowledge, nor education, nor any insight or understanding. It is point blank the end result of the embarrassing kind of vane, consumerist, artificial and selfish ideology of success imposed upon us by this rather sick system and the values that coevolved alongside it. It is literally impossible to do so. Ted Turner owns more than 2 million acres of land. Of course we cannot have this: this is a preposterous result of paid acquisition of land for private ownership, and ownership itself is an outgrowth of scarcity: a state that we have lived under since our evolution. The only way for this setup to exist, whereby one man owns as much land as a third of a continent, another has 7 leers jets, and the latest rapper has golden toilet seats, 5 mansions, and 60 rooms, is for it to exist where the overwhelming majority suffer with far less, creating a repulsive and socially offensive system of severe comparative advantage in mobility, property, access to goods and services, and overall dignity and quality of life. This existence will never occur for the rest of us. It is rather like having Mr. Creosote eating all the food in a restaurant. Of course if he does this, there will have to be far less consumed and enjoyed by the other patrons, for his gluttony to be possible. And the patrons, raised and groomed in this gross system, either bow down to Creosote, saying they are not worthy to be as he is, or as in the West they have a phony ideology of empowerment and think that everyone in the restaurant should be Mr. Creosote. In fact it will even be the undoing of those very limited few who have the majority of the world’s wealth, because it is the culmination and result of a highly flawed system that is not integrally linked to the actual processes of the planet and its resources: it is so disconnected from this that, speaking with optimism, future generations will see it with the same privileged perspective you and I consider the religious governments attempted upon this world. But of course you and I are not indoctrinated into this. Then consider the difficulty of how indoctrinated a conservative Muslim is when I need so much time and effort to introduce the possibility to you, a highly educated, traveled, liberal scientist that you and I are also indoctrinated into a false arrangement. Entertain this notion for one moment. If you cannot even do this, than please sympathize with the majority of humanity. Q) I get it, we can’t all live like Paris Hilton. So would the standard of life be as good as we can hope to achieve now? A) It would be an order of magnitude better. Free housing, with the best materials we can attain, free water, food, free access to emergent technology that races forward unhindered by the crippling monetary paradigm, free travel to see and experience the world†¦ Q) Stop, this sounds like a fantasy utopia. A) There is no such thing. As Fresco explains, there is no perfect laptop. Of course, if the original computer could have spoken (it was the size of a house and required hundreds to operate), it would have laughed at your projection that one day its current computing power would be housed in something the size of a grain of rice, held in a portable communication and ‘internet’ device by a five year old. It would have called this nothing less than a fanciful computer utopia. Now imagine you go back in time and meet your great, great, great+ grandfather. You see him as a far younger man than you, ill under a tree, teeth rotted out, watching his mate climb the horizon with a makeshift container of water to quench his thirst. She has walked 4 hours to find it. You turn to him and tell him that you are over twice his age, with all your teeth, that you move at speeds he cannot fathom in a man-made creature that also sings your favorite songs to you, and that your wife, rather than risking health, life and limb, and using most of her day to go and get water, presses a magic button and it comes out, fast and cool as the freshest stream. And the other button, it sends it out hot, just for kicks. He will deem you a liar, a madman, a utopian wizard. The point is, you see, that what we consider ‘utopia’ is culturally and historically relative. An Inuit has no use for the latest stainless steel refrigerator. He wants a fine hunting season. If you told him about a giant building called a ‘supermarket’ with every form of meat in abundance, and all you need to do is go and pick it up, he would call you a utopian madman. So what do you and I live under? What system, what arrangement? We have to submit to employment to pool monetary credits from the general circulation, and guard it jealously, and use it to attain food, living spaces, items we desire, and leisure time. We have ‘buying power’ from it. The more we have, the more choices, more freedom. So to you and I, in this existence, we perceive a lack of this striving as utopian, just as the Savannah hunter gatherer did with the lack of striving you experience. We lack the frame of reference, just as he did. I will end by telling you that a utopia is a fixed state, and this goes against our very premise: one of change, constant change. ‘Utopia’ can slot alongside other primitive human imaginings, like heaven. Q) Okay, but to be honest, the more I listen, the more it just sounds like Communism. A) Okay? Dad, you’re an evolutionary scientist. Q) Uhuh? A) What you think if you started explaining evolution to me, and I said â€Å"Gosh, that sounds a lot like Social Darwinism. † Q) I’d say that’s besides the point. A) You see, you can find overlaps in certain idea, but that doesn’t make them synonymous, you know that. The fact is, the philosophy of ‘Capitalism’, which is economic survival of the fittest through competition and everyone for themselves, sounds an awful like ‘socio-economic’ Darwinism, does it not. Q) *chuckle* A) This is a very reoccurring argument that comes up and, you not being indoctrinated into a generation of Communism witch hunts, are not truly sincere in some kind of fear that leads you to label something like this Communism, surely? Q) Well†¦ A) Supposing you were. Here’s the deal. It isn’t Communism. The argument is quite funny actually, in that it makes the claim that what we are proposing has been tried before, it was called Communism, and it doesn’t work. Having a global Resource Based Economy, utilizing the scientific method for the driving mechanism of society rather than the profit motive, has never been tried before. Karl Marx did not for see the technological and scientific innovations and capabilities that are the foundations of our arguments. His arguments were not even in the same cosmos. He did not understand, as it didn’t exist, the insight of replacing drudgery of forced servitude with automation, and was not advocating the intelligent management of the earth’s resources and applying the scientific method to society. When have we done this before? Never. How can you call it Communism? There are certain broad concepts that overlap, others that are similar, while others that incongruent with one another. This being addressed, The Venus Project and Communism, as you brought up, are no more the same thing as a rectangle is the same thing as a triangle. Look at the US Constitution†¦ All men created equal†¦ That’s Communism! What about Jesus†¦ Love thy neighbor? Give away possessions? He’s a Communist! Here’s the thing, people are taking certain broad ideas, labeling them Communist, and thereby boxing them into a corner, painting them with a broad brush, and negatively stigmatizing them. It’s called ad homonym, and it is entirely unhelpful, and not the product of hi