Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 689-691

There’s an old quotation, attributed to various people, that always comes to mind when I look at public policy: “You do not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed.” Now that lack of wisdom is on full display, as policy elites on both sides of the Atlantic bungle the response to economic trauma, ignoring all the lessons of history.
The Lesser Depression
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York TimesPublished: July 21, 2011

Many critics have scoffed at Murdoch’s transformative education rhetoric and his goals to “extend the reach of great teaching.” Is this “philanthropic” initiative to evaluate teachers and students through standardized test scores a testament to his commitment to “great teaching,” or might it reveal a different sort of dedication—one to earning great profit?

How Rupert Murdoch Could Get His Hands On Your Kid's Information--And It's Legal

AlterNet / By Erica Hellerstein,
July 20, 2011

And, of course, to ever improve the dumbing down of the population. --Jack

  By presenting only protocols, outcome-based education (which is, in reality, mind control or "programming") is the openly stated goal of public schooling, not general, understanding-based education. Our country is populated by the products of this policy of having "only" protocols presented and committed to memory. These "products" are designed to be obedient soldiers, pliable employees, imprudent consumers of goods and services, and otherwise uncritical servants of established corporate and statist interests.

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  In not being trained to think critically and creatively, students are programmed in reading and thinking only to the level of abiding to instructions (e.g., reading a procedural manual or slavishly following edicts from "on high" issued by so called authorities).

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Unfortunately, this is a mind numbing action which becomes insidiously habituated. To be under the rule of task masters; to be dictated as to what to think by others or via the media; to labor under the illusion of being a well-informed individual; to become a stillborn adult, a life-long adolescent - these are the results of our century old institution. The ideal of self-determination is trampled mercilessly and in its place grows self-alienation. In being aggressively indoctrinated not to think . . . that is, in being programmed against our very nature, is it any wonder most of us live in a constant state of low-level fear and are anxiously disoriented in an ocean of chaos without the ability to judge as to what are appropriate and beneficial goods and values?

Tragedy & Hope

Trivium 5-Page Summary

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 686-688

Last week I spent a few days in the Deep South — a thousand miles from the moneyed canyons of Manhattan and the prattle of Washington politics — talking to everyday people, blue-collar workers, people not trying to win the future so much as survive the present.

They do hard jobs and odd jobs — any work they can find to keep the lights on and the children fed.

x
No one mentioned the asinine argument about the debt ceiling. No one. Life is pressing down on them so hard that they can barely breathe.
…
They are people whose bodies melt every night in a hot bath, then stiffen by sunrise, so much so that it takes pills for them to get out of bed without pain.
They, Too, Sing America

By CHARLES M. BLOW
New York Times
 Published: July 15, 2011



History's economic and political power structures have always fearfully abhorred idle people as potential troublemakers, yet Nature never abhors seemingly idle trees, grass, snails, coral reefs, and clouds in the sky... ...I noted that nature did not require hydrogen to "earn a living" before allowing hydrogen to behave in the unique manner in which it does. Nature does not require that any of its intercomplementing members earn a living.
R. Buckminster Fuller

The intelligent use of the world's resources will provide for all human needs, and we have more than enough resources to take good care of every person on earth.
Jacque Fresco

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 684-685

What, after all, is work? Nuances aside (as insightful as exploring them can be), work is production forced by and for survival. Its objectionable aspect isn't production, it's forced labor to live.

Bob Black

Until I was well into my thirties I almost always thought of my jobs as interruptions, intrusions into the parts of life on which I could become closest to being me. But gradually, by thousands of steps, each as insignificant as the twitch of a second hand, we get broken in, by infinitesimal stages we change, from rebellious colts to seasoned, stolid wheelhorses. Somehow we come not merely to accept the harness, but to need it. To be deeply uneasy, even deeply afraid, without it.

G. J. Meyer
 Scenes From The Downsized Life
July 1995 Harper's

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 682-683

Learning is significantly important for Laszlo. Learning leads to differences and creativity--and creates "true individuals."

The human mind has led to the creation of more technologically sophisticated societies, advanced societies that have somewhat freed themselves from the basic sphere of survival. In turn, an advanced society--more free from the raw struggle of survival-- propagates culture. Of course this is true for individuals too! Such advancement allows both persons and societies to pursue "higher needs" such as aesthetics, intellectual pursuits, and the quest for ultimate meaning.

Consciousness In The Cosmos: Perspective of Mind: Ervin Laszlo
Beatrix Murrell

I would love to know how to set us free, whether it be a word, strategy, different approach…whatever. I am willing to try. The desire to be free is definitly winning, unfortunately the need for money to live is keeping me still, at least I have recognized I am a slave and so tired of it all. You get no where at times in jobs.
Kristen Perrotta said on Your Thoughts on How to Become Free

May 5, 2011

I hear you, Kristen.

Millions of Americans feel the same way.

gerry

Gerry Spence's blog