From:
kunstler.com/blog/2012/04/strange-jubilee-1.html
APESTER (JOBSTER - LOBSTER)
Busty says:
“Within our cultural paradigm, we seek a rationale to evaluate everything, and economics are usually used to justify using and abusing nature. Economics seems to dominate this particular age, not art, or even science. We are all programmed extensively from a young age to regard it as the penultimate source of value and necessity.”
Apester replies:
Howdy folks ! The Apester is back again! As far as the Economic Principle being the unifying value of a society, the God and Religion of a society, just like “Education” and “Studying” is kind of the Religion of South Korea, well, all societies need large scale Narratives, large scale Numbers to measure themselves, they all need some common ground in which everyone believes in, thinks about, in which they all are “Part of Something” and such: our society has a Number the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) and similar numbers and statistics (a lot of them dealing with Cash, Money and such, like Unemployment, the “Economy” and such) that unify all thought and values and goals and targets and creates an imaginary “Collective Result” a “Collective Achievment”, an “Aggregation of Result” (we are all soldiers marching on and winning the war of GDP), in the form of statistics and numbers in which to compare countries with other countries to see “Who is Doing Better” and such.
But anyone looking at this number and this value from the outside will immediately see what a joke it actually is: a number representing all transactions in a society and assigned as a GDP and meaning how rich a society is and such. I can easily envision of Civilization a few decades from now not even able to understand what all the fuss was about, what exactly was being measured, what it could possibly mean, what use it had, they would conclude that GDP and the Economy and all the statistics were just another fluke Religion, like so many inventions of Man, a religion that is a joke made up of clowns and such, etc. The abstraction of the GDP is one of highest possible, add all kinds of different things together and call it a number and yet since elementary school they always taught us not to add apples and oranges and such.
But the Man Brain and a society need something to tie itself together, need common ground meanings and targets and understandings and such: and the Economy and all of its BS is one of those Major Elements of our Civilization, the Rich and Poor, the Unemployment, the “Jobs” (another total joke as in no one ever asks exactly what activities people should do for 8 hours a day everyday and be paid for, exactly what kinds of things must be done that should be done that already hasn’t been done ? None at all, and in fact Jobs are destined to become extinct just like all of our other substructures and ideas and concepts and all).
But alas, Man is the Infinitely Programmable Machine, anything goes, he can become anything, invent anything, assign anything and it is all ok as long as it lasts, which it won’t because nothing can last forever and such.
A person I know just came back from GERMANY and said that they have very little unemployment (maybe all the jobs the Southern European countries lost went to Germany ?), kids come out of high school and have many job offerings and such. And in general, the Northern European Countries (Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Holland, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway) all have perfect economies, all have jobs and all works well and such while the Southern European countries, Italy, Portugal Spain all suck with high unemployment and such. This got me thinking: the Southern countries are “insecure”, people in these places do not trust each other, they tend to hike up prices of Real Estate a lot, they have conflicts in work and jobs, they like to fight and conflict, they suck where as the northern countries do not have conflicts, they agree on common grounds, they are not as insecure and they don’t need real estate as much in order to feel secure and such.
But this is only because the Northern countries have an established society where everyone does what needs to be done without conflict, they hire people even if they don’t need them just to keep society fluid, they have a lot of subtle flexibilities within their societies, they are not insecure and the people trust each other, there is a lot of trust whereas in the South they all mistrust each other, everyone feels as if the next guy is going to rip him off, they have many legal cases, conflicts fights, etc.
So you see,a society can self program itself in any possible way, you just need to be sure everyone plays ball in the same way, they are all on the same page and such.
THIS APESTER WILL SELF DESTRUCT IN TEN SECONDS (Background music of Mission Impossible plays… Da Da Do Do Da Da Du Du…)
