Labor Saving Devices
If a country is governed wisely, its inhabitants will be content. They enjoy the labor of their hands and don’t waste time inventing labor-saving machines. Since they dearly love their homes, they aren’t interested in travel. There may be a few wagons and boats, but these don’t go anywhere. There may be an arsenal of weapons, but nobody ever uses them. People enjoy their food, take pleasure in being with their families, spend weekends working in their gardens, delight in the doings of the neighborhood. And even though the next country is so close that people can hear its roosters crowing and its dogs barking, they are content to die of old age without ever having gone to see it.
– Tao Te Ching
Men, by contrast, can be duped into supposing that the power to produce is the power to dominate. And domination is possible not only by wielding weapons of war but also by so automating everyday life in the name of saving labor that we become alienated from the very work that defines our lives. Instead of making what we need to live and enjoy life, we simply purchase it; the more wealth we acquire, the more we can afford to purchase. Soon the craftsman at his bench is replaced by a factory full of assembly line laborers. Before long, the laborers are replaced by robots. The joy that comes from making is replaced by a dull ache to consume more.
Spiritedness, then, may be allied with the spirit of inquiry through a desire to be master of one’s own stuff. It is the prideful basis of self reliance. It is characteristic of the spirited man that he takes an expansive view of the boundary of his own stuff. – Shopclass as Soulcraft
It is neither ‘man’ nor ‘not man’ that is the problem, Tolkien argues, but the ‘man-made.’ ‘The machine’ is a solution, one that we are most prone to opt for in the age of the Megamachine. But it is the wrong solution. ‘The machine’ entails the coercion of other minds and wills, domination, the tyrannous reformation of the Earth and of our place in it. - Peter Critchley, Tolkien and the Ethics of Enchantment
Juice: What does your blender say? Why let the machines have all the fun?
Futility of Escape from The Machine
Resistance is Futile
Related ZAMM… Countercultural non-involvement / escape from The Machine / NIMBY results in more entanglement with Machine - not freedom. Running away from problems, taking shortcuts, etc.
In the first chapter, a disagreement develops between the narrator and his riding companions, John and Sylvia, over the question of motorcycle maintenance. Robert performs his own maintenance, while John and Sylvia insist on having a professional do it. This posture of non-involvement, we soon learn, is a crucial element of their countercultural sensibility. They seek escape from “the whole organized bit” or “the system,” as the couple puts it; technology is a death force, and the point of hitting the road is to leave it behind. The solution, or rather evasion, that John and Sylvia hit on for managing their revulsion at technology is to “Have it somewhere else. Don’t have it here.” The irony is they still find themselves entangled with The Machine—the one they sit on.
First Mountain
First Mountain as described by David Brooks author of “The Second Mountain”, Arete p61: Intrinsic vs Extrinsic Motivation
Summit first mountain – Is this it?
Stephen Covey - putting life ladder up the wrong wall
If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster. ― Stephen R. Covey
Then, when you wake up one day—about 40 years old—you say, “My God, I’ve arrived! I’m there!” And you don’t feel very different from what you always felt. And there’s a slight let-down because you feel there’s a hoax. And there was a hoax. A dreadful hoax. They made you miss everything by expectation.
– Alan Watts, Coincidence of Opposites, https://www.organism.earth/library/document/tao-of-philosophy-3 or https://alanwatts.org/1-1-4-coincidence-of-opposites/
I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.
– Jim Carrey, https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1151805-i-think-everybody-should-get-rich-and-famous-and-do