You Don't Know Beans

"Technology is supposed to make life easier."

This is an interesting and unintended consequence of the impulse behind Marxism and the end of the British Empire. Bear with me, it gets really good.

 

Once upon a time in the early 20th century, before the days of baked beans in a can, the English were starving, literally starving to death and living in pitiful conditions. Around that same time a second industrial revolution was afoot. Think of the world just after rail lines crossed countries and steel mills were being built, but before Henry Ford's factories were all finished. Well smart people started seeing multimillionaire industrialists and starving coal miners and put two and two together. Something's got to change, they thought. We have the ability to use tractors and increase farm production. Nobody needs to starve in this world.

Now these same people, especially with their very clear understanding of the class system and how many Pounds Sterling any man needs to live a civilized life figured that these starving miners, if they only organized and got a 30 pound raise per year, could live very healthy, non-starving lives. That's because in those days, everybody all over the planet could live like a proper British gentleman for 200 pounds a year. Just read David Copperfield if you have a spare month- the whole thing is a rags to riches story. 

Then again the difference between rags and riches back in those days was not so much. All the starving miners needed to do was organize once, strike once, get their one time raise and let all the new industrialized technology like telephones and light bulbs and automobiles and industrialized farming and assembly lines and big hydroelectic dams... well, you get the picture. The future was at hand. If your were starving, all you had to do was join the revolution, all you had to lose was your hunger. The means of production would be shifted from the millionaires (who were an easily identifyable precious few) to the masses. This was called scientific socialism. It was all about progress. It was a very compelling argument. 

 

Fast forward a short 40 years and you're in the 50s. No longer are there just a few millionaires controlling Ford and Bethlehem Steel, but there are thousands of millionaires building commercial passenger jet planes, air conditioners, radios, cars, cars that look like jet planes and have radios and air-conditioners. It was all very Tomorrowland - all very kitchen of the future. Not only did the workers get their 30 pounds raise, they got supermarkets and Kodak cameras and station wagons and TV and movies and rock & roll on the radio, thanks to the clever millionaires who kept building neat-o products in the post-war era. But what did the workers have to do? Well, not much, except go to college, because all this new work was on new things that never existed before and it was complicated. You needed to understand electricity, and that's not intuitive like smelling a bean to tell if it's rotten. Once upon a time, you mined coal with a pick and a shovel. Now you have to operate the big diesel electric coal mining machines. Not so back breaking, a little bit more mentally demanding, but with union pay and benefits. 

Well if you were a coal miner's daughter, and you saw a jet plane, you got all kinds of crazy ideas that maybe you could make a million dollars and leave that old smelly town where your grandparents nearly starved to death. All you needed was a few more skills and a few more years of school. What you didn't need was to know how to wash dishes. There's dishwashers for that. You didn't need to know how to can beans for the winter. Beans come in a can at the supermarket. You didn't need to know how to sew or knit. Clothes in your size could be bought off the rack. Well, hell you were a modern woman, or a modern man. You didn't need any of those small town rural skills. Thats for bohunks and retards and low-skill immigrants fresh off the boat. Not you, brother. So you packed your bags and left for the big city.

 

Technology is supposed to make life easier. Well, if you were a college president in 1920, you had a secretary. Why? Because you were smart enough and important enough to deserve one. And you had a cook. Why? Because you didn't have time to cook yourself. And you had a driver? Why.. just because. You were occupied with higher ideas, like how to build the run the university that trained the engineers that designed the transmission on the tractor that harvested 10 million bushels of beans coming in cans to a store near you. Nobody cared about putting bean farmers out of work. This is Tomorrowland, bean farmers used to starve! They've been spared that fate by the technology of the modern world!

What works for a university president doesn't work for you Mr. Bean Farmer. However, you're a greedy human just like the coal miner's daughter and you want more than just to not starve. You want to fly a jet to Hawaii. You want to play electric guitar. You want a telephone that bounces signals off of satellites not only for you but for everyone in your family. You want everything the university president has, and you call that modern middle class life. You want a car that doesn't pollute. You want teeth whitener. You want shoes that make you look like Michael Jordan. You want fancy clothes made out of anything but fur, and you want to shop for them not just for the season, but whenever you feel like it. You want all that technology that makes your life easy because you're going to study Java programming in the big city and go to California and build a website that's going to get a zillion hits. And people call you a geek and you're alienated from society because you don't know how to cook, or sew, or knit or bake beans and can them for the winter. In fact, you don't know beans at all. But you don't have time for beans because you're competing in modern society and modern society doesn't have time or respect for bean farmers and coal miners. After all, doesn't coal pollute? Yeah. It's not green. And you're too sophisticated for all that manual labor and all that shit shoveling. You barely have enough time to finish all your education and get a proper professional job in this modern society. Heaven forbid you have to take care of a child before you turn 30. 

 

Now there are other unintended consequences of all this running uphill and competing. You actually do know how to be a millionaire. You're just about as well informed as Henry Ford ever was or could be. You're obviously not Henry Ford or Elon Musk, but you understand and live by the same rules. You and millions of other ex-bean farmers. Here's what you forgot.

 

Technology is supposed to make life easier, and save you time when you are living like the university professor, when you are running the marathon, when you are building the website, when you are actually working 60 and 70 hours a week. But it's not supposed to make your life easier when you are working a bullshit job. You only have to work 40 hours a week, that *is* easy. If you are the clerk at Joe's Rent a Car and you can't sew, or knit, or bake or fix your own light switches, or repair your own car, or deliver your own babies, what is it saving you from? You're spending all of your money just to fix the broken transmission on the car you drive to work. You're spending all your money just to pay for the electricity and internet and cable bills just to take an online course so you can make more money. And since you have weekends off, you spend more money to help you forget that you have a bullshit job. And you keep raising the bridge and never lowering the river, because you can't respect farming beans. 

 

How many years would it take you to learn how to build a house? How many years would it take you to then purchase the materials and start building that house? You don't know because you don't think about it. You just want to go to college and get a job that pays enough so you can afford a mortgage for a house in a good suburban neighborhood where you won't really know your neighbors. What technology makes you think about that and solves that problem? 

 

Technology for the common man was perfected 60 or 70 years ago. Everything since then has been for university presidents and rich people who fly in jets on the regular. There's no new technology that is more enabling. It's all just marginal improvements and fashion conceits. All you ever need were Levi's. You needed to learn algebra. You needed to read and understand Shakespeare and the basic laws in your small town. You needed to learn how to use a needle and thread, a hammer and sickle, a mortar and pestle, and pots and pans. You needed to learn how to take care of your own basic needs - food, clothing and shelter. 

 

But now look at you. You don't even know if cheese is good for you, or how to make it. You're just waiting for the next survey to tell you if you should eat gluten - not that you could identify gluten under a microscope. Don't worry somebody on NPR will explain it to you, with pop music between the paragraphs just to keep your attention. Technology is not going to make your life easier. Technology is going to make the engine in your car too complicated for you to fix. Technology is going to make the parts of your television beyond your capacity to understand. Technology is going to take you on a wild goose chase away from common sense just to the brink of where it appears to be magic. Magic like how to wash clothes, and how to wash dishes and how to rake leaves and how to write a letter. How do you plan a meal for 4? How do you tell time? How do you get eggs?

 

How? Lucky we have Howcast.com

 

We are not dumbing down. We were always dumb. We were so dumb that we were starving when left to our own dumb devices. Most of mankind is dumb. We are not university presidents. But some of us used to know how to grow beans. Those who didn't starved and died. Looking at starvation and death used to focus minds. But then some bright people said, all they need is a 30 pound raise... and they gave it to us. And for the most part, we didn't learn anything since then, 100 years ago. We didn't learn anything but how to watch TV, and listen to the radio. And we forgot how to live without them and our minds are completely unfocused. We didn't take over the means of production. That would have required focus. Most everybody who tried it failed. So we lucked out with the entrepreneurial millionaires. 

 

But the millionaires figured it out one day that we weren't getting any smarter, and we couldn't make rockets that went to the moon, and we didn't care about algebra and Shakespeare other than for the college requirement. Very few people replaced the very few entrepreneurial millionaires. Nobody's mind was focused by starvation, but focused on getting the new house and new car. And the millionaires said forget it. It's not fun any longer to build stuff that helps people like it used to be, lets focus on our mansions and our yachts. Nobody gets excited about designing tractor transmissions. Now it's more about marketing the beans than growing them - maybe getting some marketing genius to write a book about the Bean Diet. That'll get some traction. Who wants to be an actual entrepreneurial millionaire? No, people just want to be corporate execs, you know, fitting inside the corporation with a well-paying bullshit job. Heaven forbid you have to come up with the ideas, design and build the product, balance the books, work the factory floor and answer the phones for customer service. No that went out with the days when people's good names and reputations were all the marketing they needed. Millionaires are mostly assholes nowadays. Except for doctors. But were doctors ever supposed to be millionaires? Oh wait, they got MRI technology and we bought that. It's Medical Practitioners LLC. 

 

Technology is a a sleight of hand. People keep paying short attention and all they see is magic. They're sold on the whole idea that technology is an infinitely deep hat out of which we can keep pulling economic rabbits so that the dumb won't starve.