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Price System Americanus
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Price System Americanus
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A philosopher who anticipated the approaching nihilism that one half century later was to become manifest in Fascism stated, ``In individuals, insanity is rare, but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.''
The name Homo sapiens was first conferred on mankind as a zoological group by the great Swedish botanist and systematist, Karl von Linne', (1707-78). ``Homo'' stands for the zoological genus and ``sapiens'' for the zoological species in toto meaning ``man the wise.''
Standing in the midst of the psychological and physical ruins of some seven millenniums of civilization, surrounded by shattered hope and burned-out creeds, man is of consummate arrogance and hypocrisy to self proclaim his importance as central to the creation of the cosmos and lay claim to the title ``sapiens.'' Of all living species created upon Earth, Homo is Creations' most ruthless and brutal predator, madness made evident.
Anthropologists identify the advent of ``Modern Man'' to the Neolithic Age 6,500 B.C. Prior to that age ``there is no evidence of the manufacture of weapons as instruments of offense or defense against other men, --of war.'' That earlier era is identified by anthropologists as based upon kinship from which our language derived the
word ``kindliness'' meaning mutual aid. It is the proper mark of society's civilization and the overt expression of the inner civilization of Man.
The origin and development of kinship systems were identical with the origin and development of the cooperative organization in the earliest stages of human social evolution and extended beyond genealogical lines until the boundaries of the community were reached. Eventually the wholetribe became a unified, integrated group of kindred living together on terms of mutual aid and solidarity. However crude and ineffectual primitive cultures were in their control over the forces of nature, they had worked out a system of human relationships that has never been equaled since the Agricultural Revolution. The warm substantial bonds of kinship united man with man. It was an era in which human rights held precedence over property rights. There were no lords or vassals, serfs or slaves, in kinship society. In social ritual one man might make obeisance to another, but no one kept another in bondage and lived upon the fruits of his labor. There were no mortgages, rents, debtors, or usurers, and no one was ever sent to prison for stealing food to feed his children.
Those who look upon ``primitive man'' and his faith, formulas and rituals as paganistic are lacking in knowledge and understanding of cultural development. The fact is, they are purblind (or slow to understand) to the hypocrisies, inhumanity and barbarism of their own civilization.
In the Neolithic, the increase in the number of weapons found-- battle axes, rapiers and swords of bronze or iron--suggests that either individuals or groups or both had made the sorry discovery that by acquiring the property ofone's neighbor, one could increase one's wealth, that war, in fact, was an economically productive activity, a totally erroneous belief that has bedeviled mankind down to the present day.
Witness our imperial Warfare State and its trillion dollar budgets. It would be rather difficult to make a convincing case for a higher evaluation of human life in modern nations as compared with primitive tribes.
It was in the Neolithic that man started off on the wrong foot with the discovery that the acquisition of large amounts of property leads to power, and that when one has power the only thing remaining to achieve is more power.
As Leslie White, Anthropologist, illustrates, the Agricultural Revolution transformed primitive society, based upon kinship, human rights and human welfare into civil society, founded upon property rights and territorial organization that were impersonal, nonhuman and nonethical in character. Class structure and class division replaced lineage and clan; competition and conflict took the place of mutual aid. From the standpoint of the needs and satisfactions of human beings, this transformation meant a great loss; the loss of kinship.
Kindliness and mutual aid are life's most precious items and cannot be measured on the material scales of society's weights and measures. As for the dignity of man and the sacredness of human life, what is one to say of social systems that condemn the great majority to lifelong poverty and want, sometimes even in the midst of plenty, that degrade Man and force him to beg his daily bread? Or of ecocide and genocide? Of war and preparations for war, in particular the hypocrisy of thosebased upon a religious philosophy? The latter aberrations have existed throughout the Neolithic age and into the 20th Century A.D. with a full-panoplied pantheon of deities and other supernaturals to justify their actions. Witness the religious wars, fanaticism and hatreds extant today!
Primitive nonliterate man not only emphasized strength of character, wisdom and loyalty to one's group, there was also a sense of proportion characteristic of the nonliterates' world view--the proper order of things in relation to each other. One must learn the limits of the natural order, not only that one may control it, but that one may obey it.
Every culture adapts its myths and legends embodying the beliefs of a people, concerning Creation, gods, the universe, life and death; and the myth-makers usually elect themselves as the chosen people, or the first and originally created people. (In this respect verify American political documents.) But primitive cultures also included as members the doubters, usually in the older grades, and those who referred to Creation as being long before human memory, having occurred in ``Dream Time.''
The adapting by a culture of its folk tales and myths to its own peculiar needs calls forth the following observations, quote: ``We find in religious philosophy a reflection of the real world; the theology of a people will also echoa dominant note in their terrestrial mode of life. A pastoral culture may find its images in a Good Shepherd and his flock; an era of cathedral building sees its God as a Great Architect; an age of commerce finds Him with a ledger, jotting down moral debits and credits; emphasis upon the profit system and the high-pressure salesmanship that is required to make it function, picture Jesus as a super- salesman; and, in an age of science, ``God is a god of law and order'' (Millikan), a Great Scientist moving about in his cosmic laboratory, his experiments to perform.
As a footnote, it is ironic that the author of the latter poetic philosophy, Millikan, a physicist and Nobel prize winner, in 1933 when hunger, poverty and despair were prevalent in America, did not propose to apply science to the social order.
Approximately a decade later the world's scientists gave of their knowledge and efforts to the development of nihilism's ultimate weapon that threatens the survival of all life upon our Earth: an infectious psychosis germinated by a fundamentalist, commercial, military and political ideology.
Also, it is one of our folklore's ironies, circa (9 B.C. - 5 B.C.) that the Earth's first homeless human couple was evicted from Eden for having eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and in further retribution the land-Lord cursed the future conception of their children.
The unquestioning acceptance as sacred dictum, a vindictive act of censorship over thought, and a masochistic concept of original sin, has seriously hindered the evolutionary intellectual development ofour culture.
As a fitting, but inexplicable terminus to the innocent and promising kinship world of family and solidarity, there appeared a new, cerebral human. Where within and how does a high level of intelligence originate and develop? Many questions, studies and theories have been posited in seeking an answer. Is rationality or its absence related to the brain, its size, weight or configuration, or to the neural system? Or to some as yet unknown or unrecognized locus?
If size of brain offers the greatest potential, then it reached its zenith in the upper Paleolithic Age, 15,000-10,000 B.C. when Cro-Magnon man existed.
Comparisons of brain sizes in cubic centimeters are as follows:
Modern Man 1400c.c.
Neanderthal Man 1450c.c.
Cro-Magnon Man 1660c.c
The principal concerns of the research in this report are with the origin of our genus and their body of knowledge of the Earth and the cosmos, including the properties of all sorts of materialsand their uses during the course of their cultural evolution. In particular this report is directed to identifying the cradle of our Western civilization and the transitional periods in the evolution of culture from a pastoral society to our present technological structure and the psychological impact that resulted in the erosion and destruction of family, societies and nations.
Even as varieties of Homo sapiens' evolutionary development came into existence, to either adapt to the environment to survive or otherwise perish, so have various cultures and languages over the millenniacome into being that, as never before, today require a mental unity of humanity for our survival and are necessary to the harmony of the world.
Preliterate peoples knew their habitats intimately. They knew what useful resources they contained. They knew the distribution of flora and fauna and which species were useful or edible and which were useless or injurious. They possessed knowledge concerning the heavenly bodies and temporal and seasonal sequences.
Virtually all kinds of tools were invented and developed, such as knives, axes, scrapers, hammers, awls, needles, etc. All techniques for producing fire known to man prior to the invention of matches in the early 19th century A.D. were developed by primitive peoples through percussion (flint and iron pyrites), friction and compression. The fire piston involved a principle that was later incorporated in the Diesel engine where fuel is ignited in the cylinder by compression rather than by an electric spark. They amassed a considerable store of knowledge in chemistry. Medical diagnosis and practice among primitive people were not wholly magical by any means.
Thus during the first hundreds of thousands of years of culture history, primitive, preliterate peoples were acquiring realistic and matter-of-fact knowledge and originating and perfecting rational and effective techniques that laid the basis for civilization and all (the higher cultures?).
The breakup of tribal society based upon kinship was attended with confusion and violence. It was a grievous error to have failed to grasp its major significance and thereby created a distorted historical perspective of that period of ``Neolithic time, (4000 B.C.)'' identified as the Agricultural Revolution. In reality it was the most decisive and divisive moment in the evolutionary development of Man--the founding of the Age of Inhumanity, of Lupes est hom homini, an inversion translated, ``man is a wolf to man.'' It was there and then, in the cradle of our Western civilization, that the greatestrevolution took place, the creation of a new social system, the Price System, and the dehumanization of man began with the control of human beings as commodities. Thus were slavery, serfdom and social control created and enforced in the Neolithic of what is now the Middle East!
The earliest evidence of the domestication of plants is from a people who occupied the Mount Carmel Caves in Palestine who date back to 7,000 B.C. and appear to have occupied their caves until about 5,000 B.C. Among their implements were found the earliest examples of agricultural tools, namely sickles. They had no other domestic animals than the dog. The earliest agricultural settlement known, and the earliest domestication of animals, date back to Jarmo in northeastern Iraq about5,000 B.C., but it did not attain a Neolithic culture altogether. Both the aforementioned are situated within the region known as the ``Fertile Crescent'', the vast semicircle of land that fringes the great deserts from Palestine to the Persian Gulf.
Six or seven thousand years ago on the alluvial plains of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, people learned to raise abundant crops in the desert by diverting river waters onto their fields. The need to construct and maintain irrigation works, in turn, provided strong impetus to the consolidation of social organization by conscripting the labor of adjoining communities, and the centralization of the economic system with the accompanying centralizing of authority. Any men who had any ideas of cultivating their own plots were now coerced to work under the threat of having their water supply cut off. Large surpluses of foodstuffs could now be accumulated and traded in exchange for foreign goods. This encouraged formation of the first non-farming classes: priests, administrators, warriors and merchants, all of which had already been developed in Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Indus Valley by 3,000 B.C.
A sociocultural system has ruled from the era of the great urban cultures of antiquity, the church/States of the Sumerian and Egyptian dynasties, the Greco and Holy Roman empires, to today's American imperialism. It is a system that constitutes the lowest common denominator of the ability, intelligence and necessities of humankind.
It was composed of a central government that enforced social control and two main classes of society: dominant and subordinate, the dominant structure being the political rulers, priests and military men. In some States there was a class of nobles who were the governors over districts of the Kingdom. In Babylonia mercantile oligarchies became powerful enough to rival the priestly and military classes.
The subordinate class consisted of those who produced wealth by the means of their labor, the urban and rural working class. The former were craftsmen of various kinds; the latter agriculturists who were serfs, slaves, and in some instances free peasants. Where a free peasantry existed, the people were subject to taxation.
It has been stated that by 1400 B.C. most of the factors that we associate with the modern State were in being.
Pictographs: If two people agree that one is to supply an ox in three months' time in return for which the other will pay five jars of honey, pictures of the moon, the ox, the bee, and the jar in addition to small strokes indicating the numbers sufficed as tokens for them both as to the barter agreement.
Written Language: Cuneiform 3500 B.C., Sumer in Mesopotamia hieroglyphics 3000 B.C., Egypt.
Legal documents and commercial transactions were written in wedge-shaped characters on cylinders and tablets of baked clay called the cuneiform.
Probably much less than one percent of the population in these ancient cultures could write, and among the literate the priests were in a great majority. But the art was gradually extended to others: to scribe commanders in the Egyptian armies, to foremen of labor battalions, and to merchants.
The contract as a legal device for business transactions was invented by Sumerian temple officials. It was this document that provided for the next transition in civil society that was to give the Price System its distinctive character, the development and expansion of trade and commerce based upon commodity valuation and employing any form of debt tokens or money.
It reinforced the class status of privilege and power and control over others as exemplified by Hammurabi's Codes of Law, Mosaic Law, British jurisprudence and the original political framework of the American Constitution, which omitted a Bill of Rights. Over the decades this American Constitution gave support to slavery, the exploitation of child labor, and ethnic and sexual discrimination. It disenfranchised millions by giving property rights priority over human rights.
As conceived in the ratification of our Constitution, the Senate was established as the advocate of property rights; its numbers were not subject to the vote of the people until the 17th Amendment, May 31, 1913.
In the 20th century A.D., in our society, it is time to apply the Laws of Thermodynamics to our technological culture and our mental energies toward bringing into realization the creative potentialities of Homo sapiens.
With the exploitation of the natural resources in the Fertile Crescent, a system of exchange, a monetary process, was developed to meet the needs of the growth of commerce. It resulted in the division of society into debtors and creditors and eventually into rich and poor. As money became distinguished from commodities, banking emerged as a definite form and bankers as a class. Banking, credit, interest rates and debt tokens emerged within the 2nd millennia, B.C.
In Mesopotamia and Egypt the church temples served as banks and the nucleus of capital accumulation, and the god of culture was the chief capitalist of the land. The Igibi bank of Babylon has been compared with the Rothschilds of 19th century Europe.
Interest rates, which tended toward usury, further imprisoned man in debt and the strictures of the class structure. In ancient Babylon, rates were 20 to 25 percent, Sumeria 15 to 33 percent, ancient Greece, 12 to 24 percent, and in Roman provinces, 50 percent was not unusual.
Seals were used as debt tokens by 2200 B.C., and coinage was used in 8th century B.C.
Money is but one of three great instruments of class division and class rule, the other two being the indoctrination of belief and physical force.
In the words of Horace, the poet and observer of the decadence that was Rome (1 B.C.), it expresses the amorality of the Price System that has increased in magnitude over the millennia: ``Get money by fair means if you can; if not, get money.'' Money has no ultimate reality in itself but only is what it represents. From its inception it has become a symbol of the concentrated power of the ruling oligarchy who controls the means of life: the resources of nature, extraneous energy, and the technological means of production.
We, Homo Americanus, live in an era of irresponsible authority and ignoble purpose, an era of prehistoric ooze, of ancient social gargoyles and decadence, a clash of cultures and social mores that are demeaning and destructive of Homo sapiens. We are an evolutionary anomaly in that we appear to have chosen the path that leads to our own extinction.
The following reflects on an 18 page satirical ``Image'' report entitled Let Them Eat Cake, by a prominent fashion Editor of the Fourth Estate.
Nobody had ever seen anything like it...not in London since the mad Hanovers. Not since the time of Marie Antoinette and the Revolution. Not in Rome since the fall of the Empire has a city indulged itself as has the City of Seven Hills.
The classical Roman architecture that houses the seats of Government, its Opera House, Symphony Hall, the Museum of Modern Art, Library, and their plazas was the scene of ``the most outrageous week in San Francisco history,'' 1988 A.D.
Nine-hundred-seventy San Franciscans identified with great exclusiveness, engraved and capitalized in Roman grandeur so as to leave no doubt, as Society spent an estimated $11.5 million in seven fabulous days on ostentatious display. ``It was,'' in the words of one grande dame, ``obscene.'' The money spent on entertaining and fashion rivaled the operating budget of a Fortune 500 company. The excuse was the openings of the opera and symphony.
The superficialities of Class in haute couture and glittering baubles were in excessive display. ``Designer dresses $1000 and up, tails from a tailor $1000 and up, a bag $2,535, a scarf $310, jeweled bracelets $120,000, drop earrings $175,000, a $1.5 million sapphire and diamond necklace, and a $2.5 million anklet, to name a few. A gala dinner for two $400, the best seats for two $500. Seating was sought as to pecking order and publicity.'' P.S. Some of our leaders begrudge a minimum wage of $4.25 an hour to the hoi polloi.
If one needs further evidence as to the repudiation of the abstract concepts of social conscience and social justice, the aforementioned plazas, including the adjoining United Nations Plaza facing the classic Roman colonnade of the Federal Building, are the last sanctuary of the obliterated, the casualties of the Price System, the nameless statistics, the homeless, the children who have become Creation's discarded bits of poetry on the garbage heaps of the world, the hungry, the physically handicapped, the ill, and the unemployed.
As in Washington, D.C., identified as the crime capitol of the world, the Federal seat of government in the City of St. Francis is central to the Tenderloin, a dung heap of free enterprise in drugs and prostitution, on the fringes of which are the soup kitchens of the poor, in our land of contrived poverty amidst plenty. Therefore, in this environment, it should be of no surprise that under the supervision and truncheons of the police, the plazas serve as an open air Forum for discussions of the many virulent symptoms of the ancient plague that is the Price System.
It is the aforementioned type of ostentatious display and irrational arrogance that incited the terrorism of the French Revolution--and the burning of American cities. Many historical records verify the unresolved progressive instability of our Nation, including the report of The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 1967 A.D.
Force, including militarism and warfare, also is our ancient inheritance. With the rise of urban culture in the Fertile Crescent and the creation of the Price System and its class structures, there also came into existence the military class and the class of slaves, forming a major original nucleus of social control that in succeeding millennia was adopted and justified by other civilizations, including America, 1778 A.D.
Note: Under the American Constitution, slaves were considered to be three-fifths of a human being. Indian populations living in a primitive state were considered as being nonexistent. Ten Presidents were slave owners, and as President Lincoln made clear, the Civil War was not over slavery but to preserve the Union. It also was a clash between two diverse Price System competitors: agrarian and industrial.
WARFARE
Slings and stones, used as ammunition, were found in Iran, dating back to about 4500 B.C. The first permanent military organization was established in 2400 B.C. in Sumer, by Sargon, who brought the land under one rule. He introduced the practice of enslaving the entire populations of subjected cities.
In the Old Kingdom of Egypt (2780-2100 B.C.), armies were already using standardized weapons and marching in step. Savages do not fight in such a fashion; therefore, there must have been a long period during which the art of war was developed.
CLASS STRUGGLES
The ruling oligarchy of these ancient Kingdoms engaged in conspicuous waste and consumption while effectively preventing the fruits of technological progress from being distributed among the masses of the population. Palaces, towers and temples were constructed and loaded with wealth. Vast treasures, and even sacrificial retinue, were deposited in the tombs of Kings and priestly rulers to accompany them to some mystical destination.
An insurrection of the masses took place in Egypt as early as 2200 B.C. and again in the 20th Dynasty, 1100 B.C., and again in the 20th Dynasty, 1100 B.C., that had their own origin in the failure of the ruling classes to permit themasses to have sufficient food. (In 20th century A.D. America, this social control is accomplished by maintaining an artificial scarcity in the midst of plenty.) Iranian peasants rose against the priests and nobles in the Mazdakian revolt about 500 A.D., seizing land and cattle and transforming their villages into communistic communities. A quarter of a million slaves rose in revolt in Sicily in the 2nd century B.C. They were starved into submission, and thousands of them were crucified. A slave revolt in Italy led by Spartacus in 73 B.C. was eventually put down on the field of battle; 6000 of his followers were crucified along the Appian Way. These are but a few examples of the countless insurrections and uprisings throughout the length and breadth of civil society for centuries on end.
Wars, conquest, and imperialism marked the development of the great cultures of the Agricultural Revolution. International competition and conflict became intensified as their expanding populations and cultures developed within therather fixed and finite limits of natural resources. Continued and repeated destruction as a concomitant of chronic war and the ruthless exploitation of both national and conquered lands through slavery, tribute, and taxation eventually brought about the decline and downfall of one nation and empire after another.
As has often been said, money is the sinews of war, and wars are the weapons of commerce; and after their truce has been declared the Price System extorts its reparations; the Market Place its profits; and continued unquestioning belief its indulgences.
Only the dead draw no dividends from time's tomorrows.
Research reveals that from 1500 B.C. to 1860 A.D., no less than about 8 thousand peace treaties were signed, each one supposed to secure permanent peace, and each one lasting on an average of two years.
Civilization connotes social organization of a high order, marked by humaneness and accompanied by advances in the arts and science.
Seven millennia of social conditioning have inured the survivors of the human race to barbarism. The 19th and 20th centuries A.D. were America's years of ``infamy'', an unending history of the dehumanization of man. Years of internecine strife, civil war and the sacrifice of its youth in continuous warfare to perpetuate, enforce and extend the ancient ruthless, predatory ideology of the Price System.
To that end it has accepted as expendable the sacrifice of 60 millions of North American lives in a calculated nuclear holocaust. To that end, it not only has granted absolution and formed an alliance with the degenerates who were guilty of genocide in World War II but now condones and encourages their plunder of the finite heritage of the children of Homo Americanus, including the unborn.
These were the years of a subrosa de facto government, of undeclared wars and merchants of death and debt, of corrupt cost-plus military contracts and ``the stone forests of the dead''; of Fort Knox gold and Fort Apache squalor, of the suppression of economic dissidents and the advocates of reason and peace as threats to the social system and its economic royalties.
These were and are the years of distorted reality, and the sordid betrayal of America's intellectual integrity, and of the attempt by the Price System's dominant oligarchy to secure their ruling powers and freeze the status quo of class division and special privilege.
These are the years that were to set the example for today's terrorism, of assault rifles, and rule by force in America's uncivilized society; years when the Army of the Republic fired upon poor war veterans and burned their shanty town on Anacostia's mud flats; when the military clubbed and shot students upon college campuses or were used as strike breakers, denying workers their civil rights. Years of revealed corruptions of governance, courts of justice, private enterprise, finance and the military. This is the history of the Price System.
With an unblemished brain having a neocortex that serves as the central integrator for over-all adaptation, the possible number of network patterns that could be formed, or paths that nerve impulses might travel, is far greater than the total number of material particles in the universe. (Adaptation for man must include creating, the ability to explore the new, and above all, aspiration, and a neurological system made up of nerve fibers and neuron chains, and with over 10 billion neurons in the human brain, and each of larger ones having an average of more than 10 thousand connections, synapses from other neurons.) It is estimated that there are 50 trillion cells in the human body.
What a tragedy that Man has become a distorted mutation, infecting the intellect that has made him the creator of the predatory Price System.
The disintegration of kinship society, nations, empires, and individual human relations (including marriage) lies in the failure to attain intellectual maturation. It is a failure to understand that within the emotional distinctions made between ``I'' and ``thou'' (the separate entities of apartheid) as applicable to individuals and nations, there are missing the basic elements that bring about the potentialities for unity and happiness as defined by the conjunctive ``we.'' It requires knowledge, wisdom, and a selectivity, as in the evolutionary process, for the development of individual or collective freedom, dignity and integrity; and for the realization and expression of that variable factor defined as ``love'' that thus far has not entered into the resolution of differences that have arisen in human relations.
When we understand the paltriness of the competitive factors that separate us as a people versus the potential richness that is ours when we unite in a creative common purpose that the ``Laws of Nature'' freely offer, which makes for peace as well as the fulfillment of creative aspirations, then we will be worthy of the title Homo sapiens and our place in the evolutionary destiny of the universe; and new wonders will begin to unfold for us.
Since its inception, our Nation was constituted as the Price System that has governed man since the foundation of the first civil society. What is the extortion it has paid in its submission to its predatory system and the legacy left to its young and unborn generations?
It has enforced the mental status quo, achieved through the millennia of indoctrination and the distortion of language, that has corrupted man and made him capable of committing any heinous crime in obedience to his economic system.
It has exchanged the sling stones of 4500 B.C. for thermonuclear weapons as a more efficient method for man to murder his brother ``Abel.'' It has formed a Warfare State, a political, military economic triad to promote its ideological doctrine as a world fascism, preventing evolutionary social change or any threat to its elitist power structure.
Its currency (blood money) represents the unconscionable destruction of millions of human lives in war and, in a nebulous peace, the ever present internal threat to our survival through the avaricious exploitation of our natural resources under the economic cretinism of the conjurers of the 20th century A.D., whose theory of exponential growth made a creed and social virtue of greed and the Price System its divinity.
Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution should be amended to identify the advocacy and implementation of the above elitist ideological doctrine as contrary to the declared intent of our governance to guarantee the equal rights to life and to promote the general welfare.
After two centuries America is now caught in a trap of its own contrivance. The import and impact of the transition of America from the low-energy state of an agrarian society to a high-energy state of industrial development are only now made obvious by the vultures (domestic and foreign) who now prey upon its disintegration. Just as nuclear weapons represent a quantum leap in the field of destruction and their use in the destruction of humankind, so does the use of extraneous energy and technology represent a quantum leap in the methods of producing the material wealth of our Nation and in the process assure the demise of the Price System. In both instances a new form of governance, based upon a new method of operation and dedicated to creative principles that assure the evolutionary continuance of life, is imperative.
The principle justification given for the existence and operation of our technological mechanism is profit. But the specifications of its operation proceed by way of the elimination of the worker/consumer whose purchasing power under prior circumstances contributed to its continuance. As indicated on Technocracy's chart, Man-hours and Production, the two long-time curves--the growth of production and the decline of man-hours per unit of production, the latter of which has seen a spectacular decline, identify the problem that is insoluble under the profit motive.
Kilowatt hours of extraneous energy, technology, automation, robotization, miniaturization and computerization have rendered not only the man-hours of human productive effort obsolete but also the ``value'' and place of the ``corporate state'' and capital.
In 1985 the KWH costs of energy used in industrial and commercial endeavors were 8.5 to 8.9 cents per KW. A human being at his best can do work only at the rate of about one-tenth of a horsepower in a 10-hour day; one-tenth HP=one-thirteenth KW. A kilowatt=1.3410 horsepower. It is also proven that KWH will do productive work far in excess of the human man-hour, faster and better, at a high load factor, and incorporate quality in its design. No cultural system activated by human energy alone can develop very far.
The continuance of the Price System and profit motive has been made possible only by wars, preparation for wars, foreign loans, extended credit, subsidization and guarantees by government, planned obsolescence, artificially created scarcity and the mortgaging of unborn generations.
The Gross National Product represents not only the degradation of our nation's natural resources but also the degradation of its people as research reveals:
Also included in the GNP America's other ``miserabilis'', war's forgotten casualties, the mentally ill, the physically handicapped, the street people, the prostitutes, the suicides, the victims of crime, and the millions who are addicted to drugs as reported by the National Institute of Drug Abuse.
What legal or moral justification is there for the existence and continuation of this degradation of humanity or for the political/business ideology that fosters it? A new report from the United Nations Children's Fund challenges the divine right of GNP to measure national prestige and progress stating, ``What if a Nation's standing were measured not in dollars or missiles but by the survival rate of its children.''
Furthermore, the GNP is the distorted language of ``voodoo economics.'' It represents not the wealth of our Nation, but the exploitation and serious depletion of our finite natural resources. Life is measured and limited by the carrying capacity of the arable land, by its biotic potential, by every inch of topsoil, each drop of water, kilowatt and extraneous energy, the minerals for our technological society, and the human intelligence to sustain it and equitably share it.
A system based upon exponential growth on a finite Earth cannot continue without our destruction.
Without energy--the technology of production is silent; without the wealth of natural resources--both energy and the productive mechanism are meaningless; without the freedom to participate in the consumption of the production made possible by the natural resources, energy and technology--life is impossible, and equality, liberty, freedom, the pursuit of happiness and peace are expressions of ignorance, arrogance and hypocricy--not democracy.
Man must be true to himself and to an unborn humanity, high in his mind, faithful in his dedication, clear in his sight, that he may in his knowledge and actions be society and a law unto himself. When private man shall act with original creative views, the luster will be transformed from the actions of corrupt predator chieftains to those of gentlemen, a Homo sapiens Americanus, evolved from a perfect orchestration of creative scientific reasoning and matter that gives access to a new tree of knowledge.