NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #19/NN_1992_19.iso/spool/alt/support/1264

Internet Message Format | 1992-08-26 | 8.3 KB

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From: [e-mail] (Gary Murphy)
Newsgroups: alt.support
Subject: Re: life and work
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 25 Aug 92 18:00:34 GMT
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Organization: Applications Software II, MITEL Corporation, Kanata, Ontario,
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In-reply-to: [e-mail]'s message of 22 Aug 92 04:44:13 GMT

In article <[e-mail]>
 [e-mail] (Ben Williams) writes:

   Funny you should mention Buckminster Fuller, one of my alltime heros.
   I haven't read his "Grunch of Giants" however.  What I was implying,
   and what I am wondering, is what percentage of the things that people
   do for a living are necessary for our "living" and what percentage is
   the consumerist nonsense we have come to live with in America.

Fuller defined what he called first and second class evolution.  The
first class stuff is the way nature operates in designing new creatures
and habitats.  The second class stuff occurs as a by-product of other
activities, and is generally the way we humans progress.

For example, and drawing also from Bucky Fuller, despite the very
earnest efforts of the war/industrial machine to keep the world masses
ignorant, the world literacy rate is rapidly approaching 100%!  Also,
the poor today, even the remote rural poor, have advantages today the
kings of 300 years ago would never have imagined.  This is not to
justify North America's 15% of humanity consuming 85% of the world
resources, just to offer at least one glimmer of hope that once again,
things are not always so bleak as you would paint them.

But back to Ben, first a thanks for posting, as the volume of words
alone shows a concern for us; if he were as negative and ambivalent as
the words portray, he'd not be here trying to find answers for problems
we all share.  But back to Ben, and perhaps by extension to others,
there is this question of, given you alone cannot save the world
single-handledly, how much of the solution does he want to be.  What
does he want to _do_ ...

   These are good questions.  I wish I knew the answers.  If anyone would
   like me to get into my long list of personal problems, I wouldn't mind
   doing that too much.

You must enjoy psychotherapy, and if not, they would _love_ to see you.
As for the present discussions, let's just call your problems 'the set
P' where elements of P are things Ben is troubled by.  Then we consider
the set not-P, whose elements are not in P.  Now, Ben, how do you tell
when something belongs in P and not not-P?  How do you know when they
are a problem?

   Basically what I want to do before I die is to
   experience life as a "real" human being, something I have never seemed
   to be able to do.  To be able to feel alive, to be able to feel real
   joy.

You've been sold a bill of goods here.  Joy can only be felt by a person
while they are alive, but the same is true of troubles and pain.  That
you have the 'personal problem set' at all shows us you already
experience life, not as an imaginary person from fantasy or television,
but as a "real" human being.  Accept no substitutes.

Are your feet on the floor?  Is the air on your cheek cold or hot?
Notice your breathing.  How does it feel to breathe from the belly?
Which bones and muscles move when you breathe?  If you answered any of
those questions, you have fulfilled your wish!

Now let's get on to the good stuff ;-)

   come into existence.  "where do YOU _want_ to be?"  -  I want to be
   here, now and alive (real life to us empty meaningless people is a
   frightening thing).  There are lots of things I would like to do, but
   what difference does it make really.  I see your questions as an
   indication that you have bought into this way of "living" that I am
   talking about.  I recently went about a job and I was given a form to
   fill out, and one of the questions was: "Where do you see yourself 5
   years from now."

The late, great american composer John Cage once called his good friend
Max Ernst about a clause in the application for a government grant which
asked him to sign a statement that he would never try to overthrow the
government of the United States.  Cage was in a quandry.  Max told him
to "Sign the papers, and continue spreading joy and revolution
everywhere"

   I mean, I know I am a
   pretty screwed up person (if you are interested in how screwed up I am,
   well, maybe later...)

This may be splitting hairs, but if you are so screwed up, how did you
manage to write so many screens of reasonably decent grammar in one of
the world's most complex languages?  Confused and possibly misdirected
(I suspect therapy in there somewhere) perhaps, but it can and does
happen to nearly everyone.  There is no operating manual for human
beings, we simply do the best we can with what we have and who can fault
anyone for buying psychological snake oil from a silver toungued Ph.D.?

   people that ask questions like that. "How do you want the world to
   remember you and what achievements do you want to leave behind you?
   Given these lists, what can you do today toward these goals?"  Sorry if
   this sounds like I am putting you down, but I think a real human being
   who is really living does not need to ask questions like this.

Can you tell us why this must be so?  _How_ do you know this of "real"
human beings (of which you are one and so am I --- it's a fact!) when
you also claim to know you are not a "real" human or else you would not
be here trying to help us all find out how to be one?  The reality of me
is just me.  All you will ever know of me are the consequences of my
actions, and what goes on inside any head other than your own is always
a complete mystery.

As for what you leave behind: How do you know those, like Bucky Fuller,
who came before you?  How do you experience the devotion of your city's
chief engineer or it's first chief engineer?  How do you know the names
Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, William Shakespeare?  Does any subjective
answer to the question "Why am I here?" by these and the countless men and
women whom this moment support your life despite your complete rejection
of returning that favour to the future, does any such answer have any
bearing on how you know of these people today?  No.  Forget 'meaning'.

   A person that has a goal in life, and then
   proceeds to try to acheive that goal, is a good American, but he is a
   slave to this idea that we are what we do.  Of course my hero Bucky Fuller
   is someone who did exactly that kind of thing I think.  So I am not really
   sure that you are wrong.

My point.  Thanks Ben!  One question: how do you know so much about what
is and what is not a good american or a "real" human being?  Are such
values of any use?  Bucky concluded that day standing by the cold waters
that were to take him from this world (and thereby require relatives to
care for his family), that his experience was not owned by him, but by
Reality who had lent it to him.  He adopted the simple goals of seeing
what one penniless, powerless, lone individual could accomplish toward
achieving maximum advantage for the maximum number of earth inhabitants
for the minimum energy investment.  He decided his measure of success
would be modelled on Christ's statement of the lillies of the fields,
and in the year before he died fifty years after, he still had the same
goal, had still not shown a profit, and had spent a total of $3 million
of other people's money in _doing_, in leaving behind that legacy, not
of whisps of whys, but of _how_to_ and things done for all of us.  He
called his life story the Guinea-pig B experiment.

Thanks again for voicing these concerns we all share and opening the
floor to helping us help ourselves; this is now something you have
_done_, and done for others, that will always be a part of your history,
and the sole part of your history which makes you real to the other net
readers such as myself.

Now ... what needs doing?




--
Gary Lawrence Murphy - [e-mail] - [phone] x3709
 Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.