Econ. 101* – By Alan Watts
Wednesday, October 7, 2015 at 04:05PM In a lecture titled The Veil of Thoughts, Alan Watts examines how ideological and economic abstractions impact humanity and the natural world. I’ve transcribed the first part of the lecture, in which Watts talks about money, the Great Depression, and the stupidity of American congressmen. I’ve also transcribed what he says around the thirty-nine minute point of the lecture, where he talks about how letting go can sometimes be the best way forward, the responsibility of the individual in the self-preservation of our species (as an example he cites a funny conversation he once had with Margaret Mead, which is also referenced here), and being tolerant of the fact that we a fallible creatures.
(*This blog entry was initially going to be a single entry that included three or four different Watts lectures in which he touches upon economic principles, but I’m going to break them up so as to make them more easily digestible.)
Now there is another myth that still gets around: it is a kind of over reliance on the bootstrap philosophy. There are those who still feel that if the Negro is to rise out of poverty, if the Negro is to rise out of the slum conditions, if he is to rise out of discrimination and segregation, he must do it all by himself. And so they say the Negro must lift himself by his own bootstraps. They never stop to realize that no other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil. The people who say this never stop to realize that the nation made the black man’s color a stigma. But beyond this they never stop to realize the debt that they owe a people who were kept in slavery two hundred and forty-four years…. It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.
-Martin Luther King, Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution
Alan Watts, The Veil of Thoughts
The subject of this seminar is The Veil of Thoughts, and following out the theme that somebody once suggested by saying that thought is a means of concealing truth, despite that fact that it’s an extraordinarily useful faculty. But in quite recent weeks we’ve have an astounding example of the way mankind can be bamboozled by thoughts. There was a crisis about gold, and the confusion of money in any form whatsoever with wealth is one of the major problems from which civilization is suffering. Because way back in our development, when we first began to use symbols to represent the event of the physical world, we found this such an ingenious device that we became completely fascinated with it, and in ever so many different dimensions of life, we are living in state of total confusion between symbol and reality. And the real reason why in our world today where there is no technical reason whatsoever why there should be any poverty at all; the reason it still exists is people keep asking the question, “Where’s the money going to come from?” Not realizing that money doesn’t come from anywhere and never did, except if you thought it was gold. And then of course if to increase the supply of gold and use that to finance all the world’s commerce – prosperity would depend not upon finding new processes for growing food in vast quantities, or getting nutrition out of the ocean, or getting water from atomic energy – no, it depends on discovering a new gold mine, and you can see what a nonsensical state of affairs that is, because when gold is used for money it becomes, in fact, useless. Gold is very useful metal if filling teeth, making jewelry, and maybe covering the dome of the capitol in Washington. But the moment it is locked up in vaults in the form of ingots it becomes completely useless. It becomes a false security; something that people cling to like and idol, like a belief in some kind of “Big Daddy Oh God” with whiskers who lives above the clouds. And all that kind of thing diverts our attention from reality, and we go through all sorts of weird rituals; and the symbol, in other words, gets in the way of practical life…
Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Spring. Image from: http://www.wikiart.org/en/sir-lawrence-alma-tadema/spring-1894
Do you remember the Great Depression? When one day everybody was doing business and things were going along pretty well, and the next day there were breadlines. It was like someone came to work and they said to him, “Sorry, chum, but you can’t build today. No building can go on, we don’t have enough inches.” He said, “What do mean we don’t have enough inches? We’ve got wood haven’t we? We’ve got metal, we’ve even got tape measures!” He said, “Yeah, but you don’t’ understand the business world, we just haven’t got enough inches – just plain inches – we’ve used too much of them.” And that’s exactly what happened when we had the depression, because money is something of the same order of reality as inches, grams, meters, pounds, or lines of latitude or longitude. It is an abstraction. It is a method of bookkeeping to obviate the cumbersome procedures of barter. But our culture, our civilization is entirely hung up on the notion that money has an independent reality of its own. And this is a very striking, concrete example of what I’m going to talk about. Of the way we are bamboozled by our thoughts, which are symbols, and what we can do to become unbamboozled, because it’s a very serious state of affairs. Most of our political squabbles are entirely the result of being bamboozled by thinking, and it is to be noted that as time goes on the matters about which we fight with each other are increasingly abstract. The wars fought about abstract problems get worse and worse. We are thinking about vast abstractions – ideologies called communism, capitalism, all these systems, and paying less and less attention to the world of physical reality, to the world of Earth and trees and waters and people, and so are, in the name of all sorts of abstractions, busy destroying our natural environment. Wildlife for example is having a terrible problem continuing to exist alongside human beings. Another example of this fantastic confusion is that not so long ago the Congress voted a law imposing stern penalties upon anyone who should presume to burn the American flag. And they put this law through with a great amount of patriot oratory and the quoting of poems and so on about Old Glory, ignoring the fact entirely that these same Congressmen, by acts commission or omission, are burning up that for which the flag stands. They are allowing the utter pollution of our waters, of our atmosphere, the devastation of our forests and the increasing power of the bulldozer to bring about a ghastly fulfillment of the biblical prophecy that every valley should be exalted, every mountain laid low and the rough places plain. But you see, they don’t see, they don’t notice the difference between the flag and the country, or as Korzybski pointed out, “the difference between the map and the territory.”
Image from: http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist-worldwar/5955
There was a Russian philosopher who accused the communists in their various five-year plans and progressive notions wherein people were always preparing for tomorrow as converting all human beings in caryatids – now you know a caryatid is pillar shaped in the human which supports a roof – and he said, “You are turning all men into caryatids to support a stage upon which others will dance.” But of course, you know they never will. You have one row of caryatids supporting a floor, and very soon your children are the new row of caryatids supporting another floor, so that it get higher and higher, but we don’t really know where we began and we’re always in the same place. Always hoping, always thinking that they next time will be it, and this of course is an eternal illusion. It’s much better, actually, one would be much happier to think that the future is deteriorating.
I can explain that very simply: human beings are largely engaged in wasting enormous amounts of psychic energy in attempting to do things that are quite impossible. You know, as the proverb says, “You can’t lift yourself up by your own bootstraps.” But recently, I’ve heard a lot of references in just general reading and listening where people say, “We’ve got to lift ourselves up by our own bootstraps.” And you can’t, and you can struggle and tug and pull til’ you’re blue in the face, and nothing happens except that you’ve exhausted yourself.
All sensible people therefore begin in life with two fundamental presuppositions: You are not going to improve the world, and you are not going to improve yourself. You are just what you are, and once you have accepted that situation, you have an enormous amount of energy available to do things that can be done. And everybody else looking at you from an external point of view will say, “My God, how much so-and-so has improved.”
Baldung Grien, Las Edades Y La Muerte. Image from: http://www.viejospuertos.com/web/imagenes/FA_267_112b.jpg
But I know, I mean, hundreds of my friends are at work on enterprises to improve themselves by one religion or another, one therapy or another, this system, that system, and I desperately trying to free people from this. And I suppose that makes me a messiah of some kind. But the thing is you can’t do it for one very simple reason which I think most of you are by now familiar with is that part of you which is supposed to improve you is the exactly the same as that part of you which needs to be improved. In other words, there isn’t any real distinction between bad me and good I, between the higher-self, which is spiritual, and the lower-self, which is animal. It’s all of a piece, you are this organism, this integrated, fascinating energy pattern. And as Archimedes said, “Give me a fulcrum and I will move the Earth,” but there isn’t one. It’s like, you know, betting on the future of the human race. If I were really smart I would lay a bet that the human race will destroy itself because, in practical politics one realizes that nothing is going to work out right, no candidate I’ve ever vote for has ever won the election, but the trouble is there’s nowhere to place the bet. And so I can’t place the bet anywhere, I’m involved in the world and must perforce try to see that it doesn’t blow itself to pieces.
Image from: http://i.imgur.com/xTKfNDM.jpg (Right-click to view in full).
I once had a terrible argument with Margaret Mead. She was holding forth one evening on the absolute horror of the atomic bomb, and how everybody should immediately spring into action and abolish it, but she was getting so furious about it that I said to her: “You know, you scare me because I think you are the kind of person who will push the button in order to get rid of the other people who were going to push it first.” And she told me that I had no love for my future generations, no responsibility for my children, that I was a phony swami who believed in retreating from facts. But I maintained my position. Robert Oppenheimer, a little while before he died, said that, “It’s perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell. The only possible chance that it might not is that we do not attempt to prevent it from doing so.” Because you see, all the troubles going on in the world now are being supervised by people with very good intentions’ their attempts to keep things in order, to clean things up, to forbid this, and prevent that possible horrendous damage. And the more we try, you see, to put everything to rights, the more we make fantastic messes. And it gets worse, and maybe that’s the way it’s got to be. Maybe I shouldn’t say anything at all about the folly of trying to put things to right but simply, on the principle of Blake, let the fool persist in his folly so that he will become wise. 
Image from: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3d/IvyMike2.jpg
Reader Comments (1)
How in-depth and thoughtful. I want to say a lot, but I need to read it a few more times to really digest what's written here. I appreciate it.