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Eleven Theorems
Thales calls these hypotheses "theorems" so that no one will confuse them with explanatory theories. Other terms were considered, including "ideals" and "theoria;" but the first reminds us of 'inspirational' literature, while no one would recognize the second term. He settled on "theorem" for two reasons; no one is likely to actually confuse this use with the use of the term in mathematics, since is must be apparent that ethics and politics and aesthetics cannot be done apriori, like geometry. Yet, Thales likes the connotation of logical analysis and rigor, as did the early physical scientists in a similar connection. Just as Galileo invented a new way of analyzing physical problems, so Thales has invented a new way of analyzing questions of action. This analysis is so thorough and rigorous, one may be tempted to believe that the theorems really are proven for all time and place. People made the same mistake with Newton. So these theorems must be put to the test...the test of living rather than of observing. There are eleven:
- The morality theorem
- The government theorem
- The first liberty theorem
- The second liberty theorem
- The war theorem
- The economy theorem
- The learning theorem
- The justice theorem
- The family theorem
- The aesthetics theorem
- The theorem of indirect ways and means
THE MORALITY THEOREM: The moral tradition that should exist would instill all citizens from birth with a single tabu: NO ASSAULT ON RESPONSIBLE CITIZENS OF THE COMMUNITY. Thus, among the things which would not be immoral (but might be justifiably illegal or non-virtuous) are: abortion, infanticide, suicide, euthanasia, refusing military service, simple robbery, premarital sex, adultery, bigamy, homosexuality, incest, sodomy, nudity, prostitution, gambling, use of drugs, lying, breaking promises, and disloyalty.
This tabu should be made so strong that it is psychologically impossible to break it, no matter what the personal temptation (as with the Zuni). When it has been successfully instilled, so that it becomes a fundamental part of personality, it is known as conscience. Such fundamental personality variables are formed by age five. A responsible citizen is someone with a conscience, who is physically and mentally capable of acting responsibly, who is not suicidal. The community consists in all socially interacting entities (in Cayce's sense) with a group value for common morality.
Notice that it is not a question of choice whether children are to be given a conscience or not. Notice that people without a conscience (fetuses, infants, felons) have no moral rights. Notice that sexual tabus, virtues and military defense of the group are not matters of moral obligation.
Assault is something which threatens or destroys life or the entire value of a life. Murder, armed robbery or rape, or the serious attempt of any of these, are certainly examples of assault. Deliberately destroying someone else's fetus, infant, crippled-insane-or-infirm relative, or his pet, or his most precious-irreplaceable possession may also be assault.
BACKGROUND: Anthropology shows that every society has a moral tradition which always includes the tabu above. This is the glue which holds society together, the one indispensable ingredient, the one thing capable of preventing the internal violence which destroys that minimum of social trust and feeling of safety and security without which normal life is impossible. In some twentieth century societies the moral tradition has eroded, partly because few people in a modern city feel themselves to be part of a common community. But providing people are about equally dangerous to one another, the mere time-space proximity of varied people provides sufficient common purpose for the morality theorem.
JUSTIFICATION: The act we are considering is that of creating a tradition which makes certain behavior psychologically impossible. The acting group in this case is that part of a society which in fact creates or maintains or alters a moral tradition. Those who are themselves irresponsible do not impart responsibility to others, and are thus not included. The human vegetable, the insane or mentally incompetent, the fetus or infant are all incapable of acting, so are thus not included. People within the society or without who are too powerless or too powerful, or do not choose to interact, or are determined to define themselves as enemies, or a suicidal, are not part of the acting group of the community.
There is no justification for granting moral rights to those not in the acting group, meaning that it is not in your interest to do so. Consider this thought-experiment: To grant a moral right is to place a tabu on yourself, and why should you so limit yourself with respect to someone if he is unable or unwilling to do the same for you? (Yourself=the entity, not merely the ego of this lifetime). It may sound cruel or barbaric, but there is no room for mere sentimentality here, because the moral tabu is very serious business. Once established, the moral tabu will absolutely prevent you from eliminating or coercing those you offer moral rights to, no matter how much of a threat they pose to you. There is a principle of reciprocity here, which lies at the heart of all social contract theory. On entity is quite willing to give up the right to slay his neighbor, if the neighbor does likewise, because one would have to be afraid of neighbors if such a social contract were not in effect.
But what of the case of an enemy of society (felon, radical, or enemy soldier), a Mongoloid child, or an unwanted fetus, or a human vegetable, or a terminal cancer patient who requests death? Leaving aside metaphysical or present morality, of what value to me is their continuance of their lives, when they cannot contribute to the continuance of mine? We should at least be able to make a choice, which we cannot do, if we put these things in the sphere of morality. Thus, the limitations on the sphere of moral rights is a result of the principle of reciprocity: it is of value to us to do unto others only if they are willing and able to do us the same favor. Otherwise we limit ourselves for no purpose.
A fundamental assumption is that whatever we do or fail to do to the traditions of society, we do to ourselves. Karma will bring back to enjoy the fruits or suffer the consequences.
The limitation on the number and scope of elements in the conscience is a result of the special nature of the conscience, and thus of the act we are considering for justification. The conscience is unconditional, and once instilled, it psychologically outweighs all considerations of personal value. Instilling a conscience is a rather drastic thing to do to ourselves.
We must carefully distinguish morality from virtues or from legality. There are many character traits worth developing, which I call the virtues such as honesty, loyalty, trust-worthiness in keeping one's word, magnanimity, open-mindedness, neighborliness, friendliness, tenacity and energy in pursuing a goal, and perhaps others. These personal character traits are worth developing in children for their own good. They are worth pursuing even at considerable cost in trouble to oneself. But is it worth it to pursue them to any lengths, even at the expense of long term vital interests? Consider another thought-experiment: Suppose you could not lie or steal or be ungenerous even to save a life. But that is what it means to put something in the moral code. For instance, you cannot kill your neighbor to save a life, even your own. You cannot kill your neighbor to make yourself wealthy, famous and powerful for life, even if your neighbor is a miserable son-of-a-gun, of no use to anyone, who harms (emotionally) everyone around him. It is thus good to put murder in the moral code, since precisely what we wish to accomplish is to prevent it under all circumstances; by the same token, we should not put lying, stealing, or being ungenerous in the moral code since there could arise situations in which it would be the lesser of evils.
We put assault in the moral code, despite the fact that it prevents us from ridding the earth of the miserable old codger above, because it is necessary to rid ourselves of the universally disvalued fear of being murdered or assaulted. We are not hurt nearly so much by someone lying, stealing, breaking a promise, being unfriendly, behaving in a reckless manner, or breaking any of the other justifiable virtues or criminal laws. Again we consider the law of reciprocity: which is of greater weight, the disvalue of being psychologically unable to commit a misdemeanor or non-virtuous act even when it was vital to your life and values to do so, or living in a world where everyone was perfectly virtuous and never committed misdemeanors? The choice is worse than that in fact, because if you tried to incorporate the virtues and misdemeanors in the moral code, it would simply weaken the moral code overall, because there would not be 100% allegiance to it. This is one of the main reasons for the weakening of the essential moral code in the United States. Because of the Puritans, it was for long and to some extent continues to be loaded down with irrelevant tabus concerning things which are no harm to anyone, such as sex, and entertainment of various sorts.
If we are serious about crime in the streets, and really wish to eliminate it, there is only one way and that is the morality theorem. If we wish to make it really strong and unconditional and capable of out-weighing any considerations of personal value, then we must stick to essentials, include only what is always and invariably intolerable, and leave out what is merely disapproved by some, what is of long range (but not always short range) personal value, and things we may justifiably inhibit but not eliminate absolutely. Let the Puritans avoid sex or whatever they wish, but the acting group has no reason to impose that on themselves. I do recommend the virtues; particularly I recommend showing people how much happier they are if they are virtuous. But being virtuous does not mean carrying the virtue through no matter what, but only at the expense of short run gratification (and not always then).
Let us contrast morality with legality. The misdemeanors include many kinds of anti-social behavior, such as burglary, creating a public disturbance, maintaining a hazard, dangerous driving, and probably lots of other things. Why would it be wrong to absolutely prohibit such things. Again consider the matter of reciprocity. What if you were starving? Contrary to 19th Century theorists such as Thomas Huxley, property is much less sacred than human lives. Dangerous driving, such as speeding does create a certain danger to the lives of others, and we should not tolerate it; we should get tough with fines and punishments especially for drunken driving. But do we and can we wish to make it psychologically impossible? What if you happened to be drunk but you had to speed someone to the emergency ward? If it were part of the moral code, you could not.
Thus, the nature of the community act severely restricts its content; the scope of the acting group severely restricts its scope.
THE GOVERNMENT THEOREM: We should institute world aristarchian government, whose sole purpose should be the preservation of the opportunity to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, for all entities, those living and those to come. All modern weapons (from firearms to the present) in the world must be located and destroyed. The governors and magistrates should consist only in the wisest and best people who should be given full power and responsibility in the simplest and most direct way. The potential governors should be selected by test and examination, open to everyone in the world. The tests shall be set up and maintained by humanists, for the governors should be humanists. Those who pass shall swear to uphold the constitution and shall select the magistrates. The magistrate shall combine the functions of mayor, city council, local court and police chief on a local level, and shall combine the functions of legislature, governor, and state court and head of the state police, on a state level, and of president, congress, supreme court, and military heads on a national and international level. The body of humanists who have passed the exams at each level may remove magistrates for not following the constitution; otherwise, their appointment is indefinite. A majority of the responsible citizens in any magistrate's realm may register a protest over something or someone with the body of humanists, and it (or the magistrate) will be removed. The government theorem is the constitution. The sole law is this: the law consists in the well-established value scientific theorems, as spelled out and interpreted by the humanists.
An opportunity is both more and less than a right. The humanists does not guarantee the right to life to a fetus or a felon, for instance, but if they live, the humanist owes them the opportunity for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The opportunity to live requires the opportunity meet the economic, medical, educational, law-and-order and defense requirements for life. Life is much more than survival. There must be an opportunity for a life of quality and vitality. Liberty is not the same as freedom. A liberty is any private action by an individual or group which does no public harm. An opportunity for liberty exists only where the institutions and traditions of the world make it possible for all the varied needs and desires to be met without collision. The pursuit of happiness is not the same as the achievement of it, which no government can guarantee. The government can only guarantee the opportunity to pursue it in any way one chooses, so long as it does no public harm.
BACKGROUND: History (especially of city-states) shows that the only way to permanently eliminate war between social groups in interaction and about equally dangerous to each other is to unite them under a single government. The present world situation is extremely dangerous, as two world wars in this century have already shown. History (Chinese) also shows aristarchy to be the most successful of forms of government which have been tried. The two present forms, democracy and corporate autocracy, have both proven to be extremely tyrannical and life-quenching rather than life-expanding. The checks and balances of World-Machine government have only served to make government and justice extremely cumbersome and inefficient and thus tyrannical and unjust. Aristarchy puts the emphasis on people rather than institutions, and relies on humanist wisdom rather than social machinery.
JUSTIFICATION: The justification for world government rests mainly on the same universal personal disvalue as does the morality theorem: the disvalue of violence. If we really wish to prevent the breakdown into anarchy and destruction of a new dark age, then clearly the potentially warring parties and individuals must be united by government and morality. There are other world-wide system problems facing us as well, spelled out in THE LIMITS OF GROWTH. The disappearance of non-renewable resources, and the growing ravages of pollution and famine know no boundaries. The tremendous imbalances of wealth and power and the ecological and economic problems can only be solved by the ecolomat, and setting it up must be a task for world government.
Beyond the solution of crises, aristarchian world government and empirical religion make a new focus for world civilization.
The aristarchian form of world government is the only one having a chance of being approved by the members of the present United Nations. It is the only one giving every responsible citizen in the world an equal chance of being part of the government. It is the only kind of government which can preserve the liberties and opportunities of all people, regardless of their state or affiliations. As with value science in general, our method of justification is by refutation of the alternatives.
If direct democracy is chosen, world government becomes the plaything of China and India. If a congress of nations rules, the numerous minor states of the world would gang up on the rich, powerful nations. But if the senate of the rich and powerful nations rules, then all the minor third-world nations will be unhappy. The other major possibility, an autocracy, doesn't seem possible, much less desirable, because it could only be started by one group making a military takeover of the rest of the world. With power divided the way it is and stalemated by super-weapons of nuclear energy, it is difficult to imagine any way a world government could be created by conquest.
The government theorem is the same as Jefferson's DECLARATION. Jefferson had basically sound ideas about government, except for two things: he did not realize that the majority of average citizens have never shown any understanding of the need for liberty or toleration. Consider what the first democracy did to Socrates. Jefferson had naive faith in the non-existent 'natural man' of Rousseau. His other mistake was his world-machine faith in social engineering and institutions. The system of checks and balances was supposed to prevent tyranny. It only insures it, along with misgovernment because no one can really be held responsible for the mess. Everyone blames someone else.
The government and justice theorems are anti-institutional, with the intent of eliminating all the cumbersome machinery and bureaucracy and legal hair-splitting and glacial due process and picayune rules and regulation, so typical of the World-Machine, so inimical to responsible government and rapid justice.
THE FIRST LIBERTY THEOREM: A private action which produces no public harm should not be prohibited even if there is risk of the action harming the actor. Public harm is not the same as public disapproval, but refers to a risk of genuine disvalue, more than momentary annoyance. A public harm is one which could be suffered by any one of the responsible citizenry of a community, even if they do not all actually suffer it. Felony, misdemeanor, and obscenity is not protected by this theorem. Neither is a strike by unions, nor many of the public harmful practices of private enterprise in the name of freedom, such as pollution, planned obsolescence, and unsafe products. Thus we permit many freedoms which are not justifiable liberties. More importantly, we also prohibit many genuine liberties. The sale or use of drugs, gambling, prostitution, loitering, free schools, native American religion (which uses Peyote), Marxist political parties...this is a random list of private actions which cause no public harm, which are nevertheless prohibited by law or by practice. The first liberty theorem is particularly violated by schools with their dress codes, hall monitors, and dormitory rules.
The elimination of the racist, sexist, or childist tyrannies is one consequence of the first liberty theorem. But we must carefully distinguish liberty and opportunity and equality and identity. Liberty is a merely negative condition, an absence of restraint. It is the government theorem that guarantees universal (not necessarily equal) opportunity. It is part of the humanist synthesis that every component of mankind, every role and history has worth and something to contribute to the whole. This 'equality' of worth involves rejecting the idea that every group should be the same. It is part of the humanist synthesis to understand the value of creative yin by women, deference by youth, and 'barbaric' vitality by Blacks, for instance. Liberation and integration are different things.
BACKGROUND: Jefferson saw to it that the first liberty theorem was written into the constitution in the form of the bill of rights. This shows the futility of written laws when the people who make and execute and enforce and judge the laws have no wisdom, no understanding of the spirit of the constitution. It is clear from Jefferson's letters that he knew that any attempt on the part of government to protect citizens from themselves will lead to tyranny. The curious thing about tyranny is that its intent is usually benevolent; the other curious thing about tyranny is that the tyrant never gains one iota from it.
JUSTIFICATION: Although liberty is something people value only when they lose it and need it, it is actually one of the universal values. It is really very simple: if government prevent people from doing what they want, how can they really live, or pursue happiness? Of course, tyranny never announces itself as such, but as the embodiment of some utopian ideal in autocracies or as protection of the stupid public from themselves or from unscrupulous persons in democracies. For every minor evil that is solved by such 'protection', licensing, or regulating, a dozen uglier evils are created. Utopias are never rational, because people vary infinitely in what they value, and thus what is of value to them. The only way anyone finds what is of value for himself is by experience. Government can only preserve the opportunities for the pursuit of happiness; certainly it cannot guarantee happiness, it cannot and should not save people from the hard knocks of experience.
To justify this proposition, it is only necessary to let history refute the contrary. Reformers thought they would save people from the evils of drink and instead created the evil of organized crime. Ditto with dope. We are 'saved' from 'quack' doctors by the AMA only now to be prevented from having acupuncture of Caycean medicine. Puritans though they would save the youth of America from the devil weed marijuana, only to guarantee that 95% of the youth of America will freely or at least occasionally break the law, one defined as a felony most places. This only accelerates the deterioration of the law. We have rigid licensing requirements for schools and universities, as usual designed 'for the good of the public.' But the result now is that the badly needed new schools alternative schools, open schools, non-schools are illegal everywhere, hemmed in right and left by irrelevant building codes, degree requirements for teachers, etc., etc. Everything in modern life is so hemmed in by laws designed to protect us from ourselves, that every man with an idea in his head must constantly break the law or advocate breaking it. Thus, by degrees, government, which is supposed to be the chief preserver of liberty, becomes its greatest enemy, (as Jefferson said).
THE SECOND LIBERTY THEOREM: There should be no restriction on the flow of information, criticism, or new hypotheses.
Thus, there should be no governmental secrecy, no classified information by government, no right on the part of governmental officials to hide their actions, deny newsmen access, or refuse to answer questions 'in the public interest.' The second liberty theorem also implies that there should be no censorship of ideas by editors, publishers, distributors, or administrators.
The second liberty theorem covers knowledge and information and ideas. Obscenity and other non-informational uses of language are not protected by this liberty theorem, any more than by the first (though there can only be justification for censoring obscenity or slander if it is unwillingly forced on the public, by someone shouting from a street-corner for instance. If it is possible for a private citizen to avoid it, then 'obscenity' or 'slander' is covered by the first liberty theorem.
BACKGROUND: Informational liberty has been erratically expanding ever since the late 17th Century, and is one of the main ideas of Jefferson and JS Mill. In the Twentieth Century, the principle has come in for hard times, even where there is not official censorship. According to Uhlan (The Rogue of Publisher's Row), only one out of a hundred book manuscripts is published.
It is a consequence of both the first and the second liberty theorems that all authors of any kind of material must have an opportunity to be heard. Then the public may make famous whatever it wants.
In our schools and universities, it is difficult to impossible to teach any of the topics of this book, or anything else 'controversial.' (What the hell is a university for, if it is not controversy?) Controversy is just another term for the give-and-take process always necessary for the detection of truth. It is not that the universities have any formal rule against teaching anything controversial, it is just that professors who try it are judged 'unqualified,' and course on controversial topics 'Unnecessary.'
Anytime there is any process of selection of what can be said or printed, whether it is in the name of quality or economics, or whatever, that is censorship, and will automatically entrench error and mediocrity, and keep the light of genius hidden under a bushel. The tele-net could solve the censorship problem of publishing and schools and make the learning theorem realizable. It wouldn't necessarily do anything about the problem of secrecy in government, however; indeed, it might aggravate it.
The governmental leaders of Western civilization in this century have made lying to the public their most reliable characteristic, even when telling the truth would do them absolutely no harm. With L.B.J. and Nixon we have no people with no genuine interest in reality at all; with them, only appearance counts. Appearance and reality are ultimately connected, however, which is why their historical reputations will probably be as black as those of Nero and Caligula. In the age to come, it is essential that the governmental leaders be people genuinely imbued with the spirit of science---if any such can be found, since they seem rare even in the groves of scientific academe. People who respect truth will be grateful for criticism, so long as it is not merely scurrilous.
The governmental errors that can be blamed on governmental secrecy are numerous and the benefits none. Secrecy allowed us to blunder or be drawn into WW I, WW II, Vietnam and the Bay of Pigs fiasco. US security is now seriously endangered, hundreds of thousands lost their lives, hundreds of billions of dollars wasted, and none of this would be true if we had taken Jefferson's advice and stayed out of other people's problems. England would have lost WW II and been annihilated due to governmental secrecy, if it were not for Hitler's blunders in declaring war on Russia and the USA. All through the war, the English military managed to hide the fact that they were losing all their land battles (since the generals never understood blitzkrieg tactics, persisting in WW I sitzkrieg tactics), while developing (but not using) a strategic air war technique of fire-storming, which could have won the war in 1943, which was in fact only used on defenseless, strategically unimportant Dresden.
Such examples can be multiplied indefinitely. If we had know the facts early enough, and there had been debate enough, we would have known the perfidy of Churchill in maneuvering us into WW I, Roosevelt maneuvering us into WW II, and Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon into Vietnam. We might have been able to stay out of some of it. The chances are that the USA will pay dearly before the century is out for all this meddling in foreign affairs which are none of our concern.
Is there any legitimate function for governmental secrecy about anything? Our elected leaders are constantly assuring us there are, especially in times of stress, and the simple-minded military types invariably believe it. But is there any real evidence that secrecy ever did anyone any good? I don't think so. Any time a question of knowledge is at stake, there should be open debate. Once the actual decision is made on the basis of that debate, (such as where to invade), that could be kept secret until the action is made, but all the deliberations that lead up to it must have the free winds of controversy blown about them. The more important the question, the wider should be the field of participants in the debate.
JUSTIFICATION: The justification of the second liberty theorem is not based on any universal right to know, but on the desirability of the general increase of knowledge and elimination of error, and the fact that there is no automatic, mechanical process for guaranteeing truth. The experts are always wrong. Genius appears in unlikely places. Great things have humble origins, and the last shall be first, and the first last. To fail to allow that means petrification for a society. One of the conspicuous differences between vital institutions and societies and ones which are decadent and rigid is not so much the appearance of genius and criticism, but of what is done with it. Is criticism allowed and considered? Or is it merely attacked and rejected? (As Nixon does.) The other major question is whether talent and genius can rise to positions of power and prestige, no matter what its origins or personal idiosyncrasies? If such openness and flexibility is not found, then the society or institution in question is doomed to the scrap heap, because it is merely admiring its own reflection while getting old and feeble.
THE WAR THEOREM: In order to be justified, a war must provide some potential benefit for the soldiers which outweighs the disvalue of the risk of being killed or maimed. If such risk is very great & the soldier's way of life is satisfactory, then only a truly defensive war can be justified, and not always then. If the soldier's way of life is very unsatisfactory, and war will improve it, then offensive war may be justified, if the risk is not too great. A truly defensive war is where one's way of life is actually attacked.
The colonial and frontier wars were probably justified actions for the frontiersmen and colonials, infuriating though that may be to 'liberals.' The so-called defensive wars of the USA since the war of 1812 cannot be justified. In every case we were maneuvered into them by our chief executive (sometimes with the aid of the British chief executive). If Roosevelt had not placed an embargo on Japan, we would not have been attacked at Pearl Harbor, which even then is far from being a threat to our way of life. Indeed, if we had stayed out of all the wars in this century, our security would be far greater today. We wouldn't have nuclear missiles poised to destroy out cities, for instance.
BACKGROUND AND JUSTIFICATION: Remember that in the value sciences, justification is not moral justification, nor proof of the universal validity of an action. Justification merely means the action is of greater value for the actor than alternatives.
The war theorem is simply a straightforward application of the group value axiom. Unless the group is simply to tyrannize over the soldiery (who are the main sufferers, even in modern warfare), the group action must be justified for them too. In value science, unlike democracy, every single member of the responsible citizen group counts, and not just the majority, or the 'national interest' or some other 'noble' and sentimental foolishness. This implies, incidentally, that if the risk of death becomes a certainty, then war can never be justified on value science grounds. The lower the risk, the wider the circumstances in which war can be justified, until we come to the war game which doesn't seem much worse than football.
If war is generally so unjustified, which is it so common? Difficult question. One reason is that war-fever is easy to stir up by 'leaders' because of the obligation to fight being included in the moral code. And there is a peculiar psychology about unlimited power which makes presidents, prime ministers and kings identify their personal egos with their nation's conflict. The result is that even quite pacific and reasonable young men are psychologically unable to resist war fever when the band wagons roll and the flags are waved, and young men are sacrificed to the egos of 'leaders.'
If a war is really justified, there will be plenty of motivation, without needing this knee jerk reaction.
The full cause of war is deeper than that. For one thing, there are people like Patton, who enjoy war. And there are sometimes great movements of the collective unconscious expressed in war, though these great purposes are never understood by the actual participants. For example, the slave trade may have been necessary to eventually involve Africans in the world synthesis and one might say the same thing about the Amerindians and their conquest. The purposes of the Great Way are often unspeakably, almost unbearably cruel. But its life is change and growth, and every act of creation is to some extent also an act of destruction. Of course, it must be admitted that most violence is stupid and pointless from every point of view.
War can be a game, if the chances of being killed or maimed are sufficiently reduced. Death has no great terrors for the enlightened, and if one is prepared to play such a rough game, the threat of death merely adds spice to the combat. Such was the attitude of the medieval knights, who fought according to gentlemanly rules (in theory), who only fought each other and did not disturb innocent bystanders, and who were sufficiently armored so as not to be too dangerous to one another---provided everyone plays by the rules. I suspect that in the time of Strength, war as a game of Quest, played by strict rules, will be revived, while war as it has been known in the World-Machine, will disappear forever.
THE ECONOMY THEOREM: It is now technologically possible to build a world system of automated factories and distribution systems which are self repairing, which provide free to everyone the basic materials and tools required for civilized life, which cause no pollution, and which do not use up non-renewable resources. Since it is possible, it should be built, and all the world should have the right to enjoy it. "No pollution" might be defined by saying that human lifetime is not shortened by the system, and no species are destroyed by the system. "No loss of non-renewable materials" means that the loss is no faster than the rate at which nature renews the material in question, usually hundreds of millions or in some cases billions of years. This system is the ecolomat.
BACKGROUND: One part of the background is provided by the slow, undramatic progress in the technology of automation; the other is provided by the human ecology problems described in THE LIMITS OF GROWTH. There are also the growing world political problems arising from the terrible imbalances in economic opportunity both within nations and between nations. We have been ignorant of the ecological problems and somewhat callous about the imbalances. We have believed that resources were infinite and that technology could solve all problems and that as long as the economic system grows, imbalances are acceptable. Growth itself has no become the enemy. One conclusion of THE LIMITS OF GROWTH is absolute and inescapable: there will be an absolute halt to the growth of both industry and population, one way or another.
Another part of the problem is that people are tired of boring jobs, and many people at the top of the economic heap are becoming rather surfeited with the pursuit of material things. The end of that struggle is in sight and it is time to move on to other things.
JUSTIFICATION: One of the universal needs is a sufficient degree of material wealth to make life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness possible. If we continue to ignore ecological problems then survival itself is called into question for the vast majority of human beings now living on this planet. The fact that the ecolomat eliminates economic imbalances and makes work interesting again is an added plus.
It may sound as if the ecolomat eliminates work. In one sense this is not true. The double requirements of ecology and automatability put severe limitations on what is possible, particularly when we consider that whatever the system produces, it must produce in as much supply as needed by all the world's population. Most services and luxuries will be available on a do-it-yourself basis. Everyone will be a craftsman.
THE LEARNING THEOREM: No one can truly learn anything they do not truly wish to know. Teaching is therefore pointless. Furthermore, society should have no right to restrict the liberties of any responsible citizens, including children and faculty. Teachers should have no right to force children to do or not to do anything, so long as they are not infringing on the rights of others.
It is damaging and pointless to force people to learn. Curiosity about something is part of human nature. The present system often destroys curiosity. Thus, administration of learning must go. Legitimizing of learning must go. The idea that learning takes place best in a controlled environment is wrong. We must de-school society, de-grade society, de-credentialize faculties, de-administrate everything. The tele-net is the ideal institution to accomplish this.
BACKGROUND: Anyone who has ever had anything to do with the educational establishment in the USA must be aware of the apathy and hostility of most of the students, even in our colleges and universities, and must be aware of the pathetic ineffectiveness of it all. By holding the stick of grades, degrees, and jobs over people, you can force them to exhibit short term memory.
If you were to test them a year later, 95% of them would have forgotten 95% of the material. And if you dared to test them on genuine assimilation, the ability to incorporate learning into their own lives, draw consequences and make applications, even the better students would score around 0%, even at the time of the final exams. Yet the same students can assimilate quite complex ideas quite rapidly with great eagerness if it is some 'forbidden' topic which people get from paperbacks and from each other (e.g. 'gods' from outer space, Yaqui Brujos, Atlantis, etc.).
Students universal regard education as an elaborate hazing ritual, painful and competitive and irrelevant, and something to be completed with as little effort as possible. Administrations force faculties into similarly irrelevant activities, especially grantsmanship and the publish-or-perish syndrome. Do you know that nothing important was ever discovered or done on a grant (because you can't get a grant for truly original work) and that about 99% (at least) of the 'scholarly' articles and books written to satisfy administrators are nothing but cleverly written rehash? A truly original article is out-of-place that it is rejected. No one reads scholarly books and articles anyway.
How did such an absurd system ever become so established? The answer lies in the assumptions and events of the World-Machine era. The men of the Enlightenment believed the mind to be a blank slate, on which society could write anything it wished. It was because of this belief that Jefferson was so optimistic about the common man, providing that universal education were applied. He was sure they could all be stamped into replicas of that noble class of gifted amateurs like himself who founded this country. What a glorious dream! We are still stuck with this hopelessly impractical utopian dream, and we are now reduced to forcing it down the throats of ghetto kids with schools that are armed fortresses, with armed guards patrolling the corridors. This is the usual fate of utopian ideals.
The World-Machine concept of teaching is common to all Western nations, but the idea of administrated teaching is peculiar to the USA. In other Western nations it is assumed that faculty are the only ones competent to decide what faculty shall do (which doesn't make them any less tyrannical over the students). Here, what is to be taught is decided by the financially and politically successful members of the community, who are almost never knowledgeable or creative in intellectual or artistic realms. Originally, in the early 17th Century, this was to protect faculty from irate religious sectarians, and was thus a step toward intellectual freedom. In this century, administration has become a cumbersome bureaucracy, absorbing half of all the money, poking around and regulating and supervising everything without any evil intent; yet the effect is to squelch any curiosity or creativity or liberty on the part of faculty or students. It will never reform itself. Bureaucracies never do; that must be one of Parkinson's laws. The only way is to make an end-run and out-flank the entire educational system with the tele-net.
The tele-net is just a vast two-way information channel, to and from your TV set and other terminals or libraries of books, films, slides and computers programs. It will constitute the one essential tool for countless groups in society, not just professors, but also writers, and artists, and intellectuals and businessmen and humanists. It will not work if government steps in and starts regulating and credentializing. Tyranny always sees itself as benevolent, introducing order out of chaos, and it is frequently instituted innocently in an attempt to solve minor problems. One of the tasks of the humanists of the coming aristarchy is to use systems analysis, and explore the distant consequences of seemingly innocent moves on the overall system. Such systems analysis requires computers and sophistication and the kind of global mind that can think ecologically. This is beyond the capabilities of the common man; one more reason for the failure of democracy.
JUSTIFICATION: As usual, the failure of the alternative. Learning is a universal value of man, although not everyone realizes it. The daily newspaper or the television documentary is learning as much or more than what happens in libraries and classrooms. And teaching has not produced Jefferson's libertarian common man. It has not even succeeded in making more than half the population fully literate. These would perhaps have been reasonable goals for the administrators if you buy the proposition that there are things society must require everyone to know. Yet, teacherism has failed in even these simplest goals.
There is nothing society can legitimately require of everyone except a conscience. Thus teacherism is both impossible and illegitimate.
Administrating, credentializing, and licensing of faculty (i.e., teacherism) may have produced a 'quality' product, in the administrator's own standards, that is, shiny, chrome-plated, obedient students exhibiting excellent short-term regurgitation characteristics. As Holt and others have point out, 'quality education' means excellence in obedience and following rules, which seems to be all the graduate schools and corporations want from the educational establishment, just cogs for the World-Machine. But it is inhuman and degrading to be regarded as a unit in a machine, or as a product of a machine. Thus, the present system of education is based on false standards, ones not based on the fundamental needs for learning and growth.
A personal note: All the truly educated people I've ever met were self-educated, and universally regarded their formal education as a waste of time. I put myself in that class. The learned learn from everything, especially cheap paperback books. We read for fun, not from any sense of dedication or desire for improvement. If something were made obligatory, that made it difficult.
All that any student needs to learn to his maximum capacity is a wealth of things he enjoys and some non-judgmental critical feedback and repartee.
THE JUSTICE THEOREM: The main purpose of the justice system is to permanently remove from normal society those without a conscience. The secondary purpose is to discourage anti-social behavior of responsible citizens, without doing the misdemeanors any serious long term disvalue. Felons, on the other hand should have no rights, legal, moral, or social. Victims would therefore have the right to take whatever revenge they wish on the felon. There is no justification for collective punishment of a felon, however, and rehabilitation is impossible. Therefore world society should exile felons to a society made up entirely of their own kind, where they will be free to enjoy whatever sort of society they can fashion, in complete and permanent isolation from normal society.
A felon is defined as someone without a conscience, and old enough to be dangerous (perhaps 8). One sure indication that someone lacks a conscience is if he commits or genuinely threatens to commit an assault on a responsible citizen. The purpose of a trial is to unambiguously determine whether the accused did the felon or seriously intended and was able to do a threatened felony, in as fast and sure a fashion as possible. To that end we must reject the adversary system, trial by jury, and the hierarchy of higher courts with the right to higher appeal. The proof of guilt will be regarded as confession under circumstances in which it is impossible to lie. Interrogation which makes use of a combination of electronic lie detectors, sodium pentothal, hypnosis, and preventing the accused from going to sleep for a specified time can elicit the truth is almost all cases. All interrogation shall be video-recorded and made freely available to the humanist and the public. But there shall be no defense lawyers, prosecutors, judges or juries, only the interrogator, someone outside the police force.
BACKGROUND: The breakdown of law and order in America and elsewhere is partly due to liberal sentimentality and partly due to conservative tyranny. The sentimentalists believe in the moral rights of felons and in rehabilitation. There is no justification for the former and no evidence of the possibility of the latter. The conservatives create crime with their blue laws.
Anthropology would indicate that it is the conscience, not the police force, which maintains law and order. The function of the justice system is clearly secondary to the moral tradition.
Conscience is such a fundamental personality characteristic that it is formed by age 5 or not at all. If someone demonstrates a capability for committing assault on responsible citizens after about age 8, then there is really nothing that can be done. He will always be a menace to normal members of society, needing only the proper circumstances and temptation to commit murder or armed robbery or rape. If there were some psychological test for determining the absence of a conscience by age 8, then we should definitely remove such people before they commit a crime.
In the present system those who sentimentally return proven felons to society are like people who refrain from killing a rattlesnake in the backyard. If we tolerate germs, the social body becomes infected and can be thereby destroyed.
Exile need not be punishment. Society has no particular reason to collectively punish criminals; only the victims has such reason, which should be honored if they wish. But if the criminal felon survives this, then he or she should be sterilized and put in an isolated, male and female society, which is self-supporting and self-controlling, without prisons, guards or supervision. And without any sort of contact with the outside world, or hope of ever returning.
The present justice system is a source of immense frustration to all responsible citizens. For one thing, criminals often get free on technicalities or appeals, and usually get short sentences, which soon let them escape to do more damage. Secondly, the system victimizes the victims a second time, by forcing them to undergo repeated public interrogations at trials, and re-trials and appealed trials, meanwhile placing their lives in danger if they happen to be testifying against organized crime. In the new justice system, a sworn deposition given at the time of the incident is the only evidence needed, since such things are only indicators as to who should undergo interrogation. The deep interrogation shall constitute the proof, always supervised and monitored by the local humanist to make sure justice is done.
In one sense, the high crime rate in America is retribution on the public for its tyranny. Organized crime would never have existed without tyrannical blue laws, first on alcohol, and later on gambling, drugs and prostitution. If we simply gave heroin addicts all the heroin they wished, the public would be much better served than by the present system. By making something illegal you do not eliminate it, nor even necessarily discourage it, if it is something wanted by a sizable minority of the citizenry. All you do is make it expensive, thus ensuring a tremendous economic incentive for pushers and dealers, and ensuring that normal jobs will not suffice to pay for it. Most of the street criminals in places like New York City are addicts trying to pay for their addiction. If heroin were legal, it would not be particularly expensive.
Most of the usual discussion on the justice system is irrelevant, as with most of the discussion on abortion. All the discussion of capital punishment is a red herring, for instance. The conservatives wish to vent their feelings on convicted criminals, which is perfectly all right. The liberals point out that society is not directly served by punishing criminals; that it does not act as a deterrent. That is correct too. Both groups fail to recognize that it is only the conscience which prevents crime. The justice system can at most prevent recurrence of crime by the proven felon. Threat of punishment does not deter the genuine felon; nor is there the slightest evidence that criminals are 'forced' to commit crimes by the circumstances of their life. The temptations and opportunities that appear to criminals appear to everyone. Have you never wished to commit murder? There is a kid with a motorcycle with no muffler in this neighborhood I would often like to murder. The significant difference between the felon and the responsible citizen is not temptation or opportunity or knowledge of consequences or fear of them: it is the presence or absence of a conscience.
JUSTIFICATION: The justice theorem is based on the universal need for some degree of safety and security in one's life. When the risk of being murdered, mugged or held-up becomes sufficiently high, community life ceases, and people live in walled fortresses, trusting no one (as in New York City). There is no single collective action which will insure safety and security. It requires a combination of the first liberty theorem, the justice theorem, the family theorem, and the war theorem to reduce the risks of violence for all citizens to an acceptably low level. This justice system results from examining and rejecting the assumptions that underlay the present system, one by one: Such as the assumption that rehabilitation is possible; that fear of punishment deters serious crime; that there should be a right against self-incrimination; that felons should have rights; that crime is 'caused' by the circumstances of the criminal. These are a combination of factual statements, statements about obligations, and a 'metaphysical' claim about the nature of human actions. There have been plenty of studies of recidivism and motivation among felons which refute the first two statements; that's easy. Most people, including sophists (professional philosophers) do not recognize the character of obligation.
There is nothing metaphysical about an obligation; anthropology shows an obligation to be the result of some tradition or institution which inhibits or elicits certain behavior by certain members with respect to other members of the society. The moral obligation we have already discussed is an excellent example of how such things arise. Why do criminals presently have the right to refrain from being cross-examined or to incriminate themselves? It's not a law of nature, it's merely the way the English common law system of justice has evolved. If we look at the justification for it, originally it was designed to prevent false confessions elicited by torture, one of the scandals of the witch-hunts of the 16th and 17th Centuries. Jefferson and the founders of the constitution had no sentimental horror of doing violence to the accused; but they knew that this was not the best way of getting at the truth. It remains true, however, that often only the criminal knows whether he committed the crime or not, and without a voluntary confession he will often go free, even with sophisticated use of circumstantial evidence.
Times and techniques change. Torturing someone until he confesses is still a bad way of eliciting the truth, but intensive and sophisticated interrogation techniques by espionage agencies have now been developed which are 99% successful in determining the truth of the matter. That is the only business of a trial, or more accurately, of the interrogation. Away with "trial," a medieval term. The right of the accused should be to a quick and accurate determination: guilty or innocent. The right of the victim should be not to be further victimized and to take revenge with the government's help.
Why should the victim have the right to publicly assisted revenge? Why not? It may not deter crime; it may not do the felon any good; but it may do a world of good to the victim. Revenge is a natural human emotion and need. The denial of this powerful emotion in our society is one of the causes of frustration, which in turn leads to more violence. Catharsis would be much better. Public castrations, boiling in oil, drawing and quartering and whatever punishment the victim wished (including none) would relieve a lot of bottled up frustration on the part of all of us. Furthermore, the actual sight and sound of public revenge on television just might aid in the process of conscience formation. It would eliminate the existing tendency of making heroes out of the criminals. In our system, victims get nothing except more pain, danger and anguish; criminals get to write their memoirs.
Societies get the crimes they deserve, the crimes they tolerate. If we are finally serious about eliminating the threat of violence from our lives, it is not such a hard thing to do.
THE FAMILY THEOREM: We should create the independent adult communal family with no sexual/jealousy tabus.
Adults who bring children into the world should have an obligation to society to raise them to be responsible citizens. Responsible children require a stable family structure, in which there are respected adult models. There are various types of family structure which can and have met this requirement under various circumstances, and people should have a choice, so long as they meet this obligation. If they are not sure whether they can, they should never have children. The traditional nuclear family can work for Hermits, reformers, geniuses, and others who must wander strange paths and are united in a higher purpose. The extended generation family can work where there is traditional respect for the wisdom of experience. The unstable matrocentric family of the black ghettos of the 50s and 60s is the worst form, with serial polygamy as practiced in the suburbs the next worst, from the point of view of raising responsible children.
The independent-adult communal family is the only one which fully liberates women and children. But do not confuse this with the doctrine that we should change yang/yin, or parental-authority/deferential roles between male and female and parent and child. Thales believes in full rights for children and women and also believes (as a humanist) in the equal worth of the creative yin role for women, and in the wisdom of respect for elders. When women become yang, men become yin in compensation. The real liberation is in discovering the genuine worth of the yin role, and the shortcomings in the yang role.
This doctrine should also not be confused with the sexist playboy philosophy of ephemeral sexual swinging. If we really removed all sexual taboos, Thales believes we would (like the Trobriand Islanders) become mainly monogamous (not fanatically so) as adults.
BACKGROUND: Moynihan's study of black ghetto families shows a clear relationship between a certain family structure and criminality. Where there is no respected and moral male figure, boys must either grow up effeminate or emulate men outside family life altogether, particularly the street hustlers. There is a higher incidence of criminality in children raised under the serial polygamy of contemporary white suburbs than in the strong nuclear families of rural regions outside the south. Instability and emotional insecurity must weaken the socializing, humanizing, civilizing process.
There is nothing wrong with the nuclear family as such, if the partners are tied together by stronger purposes than romantic love in the sentimental sense discussed and rejected by Bertrand Russell. Economic purposes used to work, spiritual and karmic and cosmic purposes could work in the future. Even the strongest nuclear family needs the social support of community. The rootless existence of places like Los Angeles, where there is no sense of community at all, destroys the support families often need to remain stable.
The independent-adult communal family is one where individual adults (rather than couples) live in their own private domiciles or apartments in the compounds, where all house-wife jobs are shared equally by all adults, where children of the group are raised in a dormitory after infancy, but not, of course, isolated from communal life. The advantages are several: many kinds of sexual relationship could exist among the adults without making life unstable for the children. There could be monogamous, homosexual, bisexual, or non-sexual (hermit) relationships. Minor adulterous or even totally varied sexual contacts, both within and without the commune would not, need not make it unstable. A commune would simply be a group of adults who like one another, who are capable of living together under varying (self-determined) degrees of proximity. The work would be divided absolutely equally by tradition, and there would be no other rules or central government. Adults would be perfectly free and could choose the degree of proximity wished to other members (important). Even if adults left the commune, children would not. If adults moved into the commune from another, their biological children would stay behind if they were out of infancy.
JUSTIFICATION: Most aspects of the family and village life are related to the aesthetics theorem, which does not lead to a single best pattern for everyone. The obligation to socialize children and make it possible for them to behave responsibly and impossible to behave without a conscience is related to the morality and justice theorems and is part of the establishment of peace and freedom from violence. The only thing which counts there is emotional stability, security, moral adult models, and the presence of the moral tradition. Under stable village life, the commune described above would best insure these things from the children's point of view. Under late twentieth century conditions of social fragmentation, stability is difficult to achieve, as much so in communes as elsewhere, unless all members of the family share a common path through the shoals and crevices of this transitional age.
THE AESTHETICS THEOREM: The quality of life is a function of the novelty and of the mythic potency of situations and events.
The greater the mythic potency, the deeper the I which experiences. The greater the experienced novelty (information), the greater the pleasure (interest/beauty/humor/excitement) of the experience. The greater and more detailed the relevant subliminal (Gestaltic) frame of expectation, the more surprising the details, the greater the novelty.
The mythic, intuitive, symbolic, spiritual meaning of art, rite, or act depends to some extent on subtle 'distortions' meaningful to the unconscious, and to some extent on the use of the symbols or archetypes of the unconscious. Virtually any aspect of experience can become sacramentalized if used intuitively and thus can take on mythic meaning; conversely, any 'official' symbol becomes dead if used in a rote and unintuitive manner. Symbolic potency determines the depth of experience, or equivalently, the depth of the experiencer.
As J.R. Platt says, the fifth need is novelty. The glow at beauty; the laughter at jokes; the thrill at games; the interest in an idea in a newspaper or TV documentary or conversation; the fascination of love, friendship or social occasions; the physical thrill of the surfer, mountain climber, or racer; the thrill of the anarchist or juvenile delinquent; all these values are aesthetic and depend on novelty within the framework of the expected. Any of these experiences can take on a sacred or numinous quality with the proper sensitivity, if the act or thing or situation has mythic potency.
The expectation for art is provided by style; for humor, by logic; for games, by rules, for ideas, by memory; for social interaction, by custom; for physical thrills, by kinesthetic memory; for anarchy, by social structure.
If the frame is unknown, the result is 'noise,' a blank, nothing. If every last nuance is predictable, the result is boredom. Example one. Remember the first time you heard Baroque chamber music? It all sounded the same (like nose), because you had no frame of reference. With familiarity came recognition and delight. With further familiarity can come boredom. Example two. Why are portrait photographs so much more interesting than other photographs? Because we have a frame of expectation (all faces are alike) and novelty within that frame (all faces are different). Example three. Why are Persian rugs so much more interesting than most purely abstract designs? Because they have a recognizable general pattern and endless variation within the pattern.
The other theorems discussed to this point deal only with the possibility of value. Here we deal with the actuality.
Aesthete aesthetics refers to the arts; the background is style. Intellectual aesthetics has the background of familiar ideas and information. Egoistic aesthetics has the background of the rules of the game, and expectations as to the behavior of players. Agapic aesthetics has a background of social rules and personal behavior patterns. Physical aesthetics has a background of the body's kinesthetic expectations. Anarchist aesthetics has the background created by the rules of society.
Corollaries: The best art is one that is original within an already existing and understood style. We perceive something as noise, not as art at all, if we have no prior familiarity with it. The best game is one where the underdog wins. We like the people we understand, that do not bore us. The best joke is the one with the most powerful collision of expectations, the greatest incongruity, produced suddenly.
There is no essential difference between beauty, humor, the value of games, friendship, physical thrills, and anarchy (not the same as chaos). The reaction to all forms of aesthetic pleasure is essentially the same: if the information is sudden, we are excited and we shout and scream or laugh. If it is more slowly perceived, we merely smile or glow. But the aesthetic value of something depends on the total amount of information transferred, not on its slowness or quickness.
Radical originality produces noise. Faustian consciousness of the past two hundred years is therefore mainly of value in liberating us from a style which had exhausted its potential. The continued Faustian effort to be different merely produces a fragmentation of our cultural world, and a steady decrease in the number of people who inhabit any higher cultural world at all. Faustian consciousness contributes heavily to the barbarism of our age.
When the arts and rites lose their mythic potency, they become merely decorative or game-like. Art and architecture using symbols known to be potent from the occult sciences will be far more meaningful than that which is purely functional or decorative. The brilliance of classic Greek and Gothic arts is due to the use of mythically potent elements, which in turn requires the tradition of amateur humanist architects and the local craftsman tradition. Why? Because for something to be fully mythically potent for you, it must be done by you or by someone in a very similar state. Whenever a split develops between artist and craftsmen, and art becomes the exclusive preserve of a few, isolated, tortured geniuses, art loses its mythic potency, and the daily environment built by craftsmen even loses all decorative quality.
It is for aesthetic reasons that people should live in villages. Agapic aesthetics cannot develop where one is surrounded by total strangers, as in modern cities, nor where we interact one-dimensionally with people as in modern suburban life. The sense of community (so lacking in modern life) is the framework of expectation within which people can be perceived as friends rather than objects.
We must completely reject efficiency engineering as architecture. The skyscrapers and shopping centers of the World-Machine are very efficient wastelands, without the slightest speck of aesthetics, whether it be aesthete, agapic, physical or whatever, and with no hint of mythic potency. They are dead and must be destroyed.
There can be no visual aesthetics with unadorned, colorless boxes. There can be no aural aesthetics where our ears are filled with the cacophony of traffic or the worse stink of wallpaper music. There can be no physical aesthetics where we live in sealed containers and wafted everywhere in 5000 pound cocoons. There can be no agapic aesthetics where thousands of nameless strangers jostle one another in mindless streams of flesh, or hundreds of workers sit in antiseptic rows, rigidly controlled, without privacy, no idiosyncrasies permitted. There can be no mythic potency where one's environment is produced by someone else or by machines.
Far better a village where nature is not disguised by smoke or concrete, where people ride bicycles and are aware of heat and cold and smells and sounds, where people live in curvilinear and decorated houses designed by themselves, safe in the frame of local custom.
BACKGROUND: The universal human need for information (excitement, novelty) was described by J.R. Platt in THE EXCITEMENT OF SCIENCE. The other side of the theorem is much more ancient, and goes back to the battles between the 'rationalists' and the poets in Greek times. The high-water mark of the 'rationalists' was reached by Wittgenstein, who said that meaning consists entirely in the conventional rules for use of sounds and shapes in the language game. No doubt he is correct about mathic meaning. But anyone who has mastered occultism or humanities knows that there are languages which can be understood intuitively which are not part of any language game, and are universal and not conventional. Jung made the same discovery, as have psychedelic researchers. The LSD work of Masters and Houston also shows the powerful need to sacramentalize mathic and scientific knowledge. And all of occultism and spiritual science shows that inner experience is as much a guide to reality (even physical reality) as is outer experience. The superiority of the mythic realms over the mathic is that there is a powerful psychological benefit in understanding and expressing something mythically, which is wholly lacking in mathic expressions.
JUSTIFICATION: The present styles of life prevalent in the waning years of the World-Machine show us the alternative to the aesthetics theorem. People of Practical consciousness in the Twentieth Century emphasize egoistic aesthetics, and leave aesthete and intellectual aesthetics largely to the Faustian world of museums which do not affect our daily environment. In any case the Fausts have fragmented and experimentalized higher cultural life to death. The prevailing functionalism of architecture and town planning produces a totally non-aesthetic world, where neigh aesthete, nor agapic, nor egoistic, nor physical nor any other kind of aesthetics can exist, where there is no hint of any mythic expression of such realities. Yet, the quality of life is entirely due to such things. Twentieth Century man has produced the most soul-deadening environment that has ever existed for man. This negative conclusion is evident on the faces of the people in crowds in New York or any major city; hostile, bored, anxious, gray, mechanical.
THE INDIRECT MEANS THEOREM: The first rule of social change is that it must be persuasive rather than coercive. The value scientist persuades by considering the other's real interests. By far the most persuasive form of reasoning is the living example. Thus, the second rule of social change is to transform yourself, and the people around you. Change yourself, do it yourself, start where you're at, start where they are at. Avoid social engineering or utopian thinking. Social engineering requires a blueprint and then a bureaucracy and finally violence (as pointed out by Popper and Von Hayek). Utopias assume a sumum bonum which doesn't exist, and assumes everyone will work towards a common goal (very sterile if achievable), and also ultimately leads to violence in the effort to force people to follow a single direction.
Don't assume that you are impotent and don't assume that you have to gain power to change anything. All fundamental changes have humble origins, usually a few then-obscure people in a then-obscure place who change their own lives. Things that expand rapidly with power and publicity collapse just as rapidly, leaving everything unchanged.
The fundamental changes are those which change consciousness or the ruling institutions and ways of thought of an era. The kind of changes mentioned in FUTURE SHOCK are of little importance, and some such indicators that are changing rapidly can always be found.
If you wish to change people, you must show them that it's an improvement for them. Rational persuasion has been a fundamental idea of value science since Aristotle. If you have to force someone 'for their own good,' then it clearly isn't. Force is the reductio ad absurdem of value science.
The existing social structure must be used for social change. If you first destroy the social structure, you will destroy the means of change. Violent overthrow of existing conditions (i.e. revolution) always makes things worse (rebellion is not the same thing, however, and is sometimes useful). Revolution leads to a miserable authoritarian system as the leaders try with ever more violent means to make the people follow the social blueprint laid out for them. Social engineering never works, because it ignores people's actual (as opposed to some 'ideal') motivation. Revolutionaries forget that motivations are themselves embedded in the traditions and institutions you wish to change.
Rebellion is violence directed at tyrants (e.g. the American 'revolution') and is sometimes necessary. Tyrants never gain anything by tyranny, so rebellion is a last resort way of making tyranny cost the tyrant. Today it is the majority of the middle Americans who are the tyrants.
The value sciences are concerned with action and not merely with goals, nor merely with means. If you consider goals without considering means, your ideas may lead to total revolution, which is never good. Or it could simply lead you to propound unrealizable goals. And to consider means without goals, as do some technocrats, leads to disaster of another kind, the kind that results from giving matches to children. In life, there is no such distinction as that between ends and means; there are only particular choices of actions in particular contexts. This is what the value scientist must consider.