The Art of Unlearning

Lois M. Scheel

1995

Published in:

Social Trends Newsletters, May. 1995, No. 135

One of the most essential subjects to unlearn is the importance we place on owning property beyond our needs and beyond what we can use. Where did it start, this thing called ownership? This thing that enslaves us? This thing that invites thieves? This thing that encourages loaded guns? This thing that turns friend against friend, family against family, nation against nation? This thing that fills us with fear? This thing that revs up our greed instincts? Did it begin with trade?

According to Will and Ariel Durant in their massive undertaking of eleven huge volumes of The Story of Civilization, they write: "Trade was the great disturber of the primitive world, for until it came, bringing money and profit in its wake, there was no property, and therefore little government."

Now we have trade, property, lots of government, and if we keep on acquiring more and more property at the expense of our natural resources, we may become the blessed inhabitants of a primitive world again, only this time a primitive world that has been ecologically degraded beyond restoration.

People hang on to their property as though it is more important than life. Some even control it from the grave through prerecorded wills and smart guardians or wily lawyers. And with property ownership comes all its attendant nuisances: taxes, zone restrictions, mortgages, upkeep, insurance, thieves, con artists, and after death -- probate for the grieving family, grieving over the loss of a loved one, or grieving over the monetary loss to yet another form of legal blackmail -- or both.

In some cases it takes almost a lifetime to acquire that important property, and a lifetime isn't very long. So what is so important about having all this property to worry about? Usually by the time we've accumulated it, we are too physically spent to enjoy it. In our struggle to become property wise, we've forgotten how to live. Parents struggle through their child-rearing days to get that large house that will accommodate the family more comfortably only to discover that by the time they fulfill their dream, their chicks are ready to fly the coop and leave them roosting in a house too big to handle.

William Randolph Hearst spent most of his life acquiring property. He collected castles, six in all, like others collect guns, and filled them with more collectibles. With the help of his widowed mother's fortune, he collected newspaper syndicates and used the power they gave him to influence public opinion. He also used his power to manufacture news events and add spice to the written word. Then he printed these events as fact, probably changing the course of history in some instances, especially his frenzied buildup and support of the Spanish American War. When he died, he left warehouses full of his collection of possessions from all over the world, some forgotten, some never looked at again, which were eventually auctioned off. But his mania for possessing as much as possible before he left this world probably put him at the head of the class in taking more than his share of nonrenewable natural resources. And what good did these possessions do him? He turned out to be mortal after all, and the Grim Reaper removed him from the social scene just as it does all of us eventually.

Of course, under our existing, weak social structure, owning property is one way some people seek security. In some instances, owning property is the only security they have. If they own a house and can afford to pay taxes on it, they don't have to worry about being evicted or joining the legions of homeless people living in the streets. But just how secure are they? One long-term illness could wipe out everything they own, leaving them financially and property poor.

We use air service without owning an airplane. We can ride any public transit system at our disposal without owning the vehicle. So why do we insist on owning a car? Because under our present system, cars are necessary. We have no efficient mass transportation system installed, and so far as we know, there are no plans for installing one in the near or distant future. But suppose we had car rentals placed at strategic locations, and all we had to do was call and have the latest, most energy efficient model delivered to our door. This would eliminate the high cost of insurance. The high cost of maintenance. The high cost of taxes. And it would eliminate the highest cost of all; buying the car in the first place. All we would be expected to do is contribute to its use. Then when we reached our destination, we could call the nearest car rental and have their service personnel pick up the car. This way we wouldn't be tying up a vehicle for hours, parked on the street somewhere; until we needed it for our return trip, we wouldn't be required to contribute to its use while it wasn't in use. (Now when we rent a car, we pay plenty for its use whether or not it is in service. It can be parked at the curb for hours, days, we still pay for its use.) With an efficient car rental service, fewer cars would be needed, relieving some of the pressure on our environment. Of course in this type of transaction, the car would no longer be a status symbol to show our friends and neighbors just how far up the ladder of success we have climbed -- or how deeply in debt we are.

If cities were designed so that dwellers there could walk to the market, theater, public swimming pool, health facility, public park, and so on, could we unlearn our love affair with our car so this easy, healthful exercise would become socially acceptable? Wouldn't it be easier to walk a short distance than:

Find our misplaced car keys.
Climb into our car.
Secure the kids in seat belts.
Secure ourselves in seat belts.
Fight traffic from the time we back out of our driveway to the time we reach our destination and then return back home again..
Wait in line to gas up.
Kill time while we have our car serviced.
Call in a locksmith when we've exhausted all ways of opening our door after locking the keys inside.
Find someone with a jump cable after we've forgotten to turn off our lights on a foggy morning.
Be at a complete loss for transportation when the car fails to start.

Foot power takes up little room. Car power requires more and more roads, and the bigger and faster the vehicle, the more room it needs. It has been said that highway speculators gaze where cattle used to graze. Some day, perhaps, the only scenery we will be able to see from our cars while out for a drive on the not-so-open road is more cars.

And how about shorter work days, shorter work weeks and longer vacations. We could keep the factories and businesses in operation 24 hours a day with four-hour shifts. Just think: no more traffic jams; no more crowded buses, commuter trains, and recreation facilities; no more spending weekends getting ready for work on Monday by catching up on chores we didn't have time for during the previous week. All this wouldn't be so difficult to unlearn, would it? Divide up the work load? Shorter hours? Longer vacations? Give everyone qualified and old enough a job for as long as jobs last? As machines continue to eliminate jobs, we may get that work shift down to two hours a day. Full-time employment is coming to a close. If you haven't figured this out by now, you aren't very observant.

Ah, but what about sufficient income? Probably the most difficult thing to unlearn would be replacing value with measurement. After all, we can't go on wasting our nonrenewable resources forever. Since energy is the only common denominator of all goods and services, how about energy accounting! Can't picture a world without money? Money, a measure of nothing? Replace it with energy accounting that can be measured? We are fast becoming a cashless society anyway, what with technology replacing tender with bits and bytes and direct transfer.

With energy accounting, everyone could have a piece of that elusive pie whether employed full time, part time or not at all. We already have the technology and the technological experts to install such a system. This system would replace social insecurity with sufficient social security for all citizens as their birthright, getting rid of the cruel practice of basing their security on the amount of their income in a declining job market.

When will Americans reach their limit of tolerance under a system that can produce an abundance but creates shortages to keep prices up while many of its citizens go hungry? When will they realize that full-time employment is on its way out; that machines are the new slaves; that they will have to forget about the nobility of work and demand an income instead? When will they awaken to the failure of the political system? Well, it appears that many of them already have reached their limit of tolerance. Consider the violence in our streets and in our homes. It has only one way to go unless we replace a flagging political system with the intelligent use of scientific methods to solve our serious social problems.

It's true that the unwise use of our technology by politics, the military and big business brought about many of these problems. Now it will take the intelligent use of technology to solve them, but we won't find the answers in politics. From its beginning, politics has seldom solved serious social problems. In this modern age of high technology, the situation grows worse. Does a politician know how to put a dam together, or even if a dam is needed, or if it is feasible at a certain location? No. He is concerned only with getting it named after him. Besides, our overworked politicians don't have time to solve social problems. They're too busy plotting their strategy for the next election.

Like Shel Silverstein's, Where the Sidewalk Ends, when the author's imaginary world begins, and Dr. Seuss', On Beyond Zebra, where the author takes us beyond the alphabet to sharpen the imagination, why don't we reach out beyond what we have been taught to accept as gospel and investigate other avenues for living. And while we are mentally traveling these enlightening avenues, why not put our imagination to work. Be there. Live in that world we are investigating. This will help our unlearning process. Then see if we want to continue under an unfair system that creates its own increasing crime statistics by subjecting its citizens to hunger, disease, decaying infrastructure, mindless wars, and lack of concern for those displaced by the machine age.

Customs and habits die hard. We've learned everything about our present social system except why it doesn't work. Now it is time to unlearn many of the things we have been taught by examining some facts. We could start by investigating Technocracy's Technological Social Design booklet. This design is a concept of the way our social system could be managed to accommodate the technological age we are caught up in. This is not to say that this concept is the way things actually will be in the future; it was designed as a possible alternative to our present unworkable political structure. But, until someone comes up with a comparable functional social design, this is the only one in existence that covers all bases and is compatible with our advancing technology.

Perhaps we should say that it is what you "unlearn" after you know it all that really counts.