The Matrix

I finished the book Straw Dogs that I had mentioned a couple days ago. It started out as a critique of humanism and progress--interesting...But the closing chapter blew me away. The economy started making sense to me. Language is such a hard thing to use to illustrate an epiphany-- dancing around a fire painted in root powders is probably better, but how would I show that on a blog.

Ok economies. Hunter gatherer societies were around 15 thousand years ago, then these new guys called farmers drove these primitives to the edges of the world and well that is pretty much how things went up until about 200 years ago. A couple centuries ago people started making better machines. The machines were expensive and only the rich guys owned them. For the poor people to find work, they had to move to the city so they could work in the factories were all these machines were. Now we live in a consumer economy, blah blah.... But what John Gray is pointing out is that machines are taking over. People in the near future are not going to need to work. The machines will do almost all the work... But more importantly he asks, what will people do to occupy themselves in this new leisure culture? And this is the part that blew me away, its been there in my face all along. They will entertain each other! And my oh my how we entertain each other today. So he says we create jobs that only function to shield us from boredom. We invented a butt load of these jobs last century, including psychiatry, and we increased the volume of older jobs such as bureaucrats, actors, etc. Don't forget the popularity of DVD's, and video games--teams of people are working on this stuff.

I always kind of wondered what the hell I was going to school for and now I have discovered it. I am an aspiring entertainer. Any cultural study is entertainment. Ever wonder why porn is so rampant? Gray would say it is there to keep us entertained, to keep us unbored. He predicts that when sex looses its ability to keep us unbored we will seek out entertainment else where, maybe in monasteries. This was all much more profound in the context of the whole book, but I had this moment of clarity in which I saw graphic designers, writers, movie stars, astrologers, Oprah, all bumping into each other while laughing and crying and thinking they were important.... Life can be really simple sometimes, I need to never forget that.