Episode 83 Follow-Up: Q&A with Frithjof Bergmann

0:06 Mark: Hi, this is Mark from the Partially Examined Life. This question and answer session with Frithjof Bergmann is a follow up to the Partially Examined Life episode 83, which you can listen to at partiallyexaminedlife.com or through iTunes. That episode produced a pretty tremendous reaction in our audience. And Frithjof has been good enough to give us some more of his time to answer some questions from our listeners. For more information about Frithjof and new work, go to newworknewculture.com Our first question is from Adam Blatch. He asks, please explain in more detail the new culture that you hope to create.

0:36 Unknown speaker: One of the first, main, main almost bone cutting differences between the culture that I hope will come into being and the culture we now have is a culture in which poverty will be abolished. And that will make, to my mind, an almost unimaginably powerful difference. If people the world over will no longer have to live on the edge of destitution or in a deep pit of poverty. But on the contrary, they will all have access. Everybody will have access to technologies, materials, ways of manufacturing so that people, not because they have a job, but just because they have in their village or in the part of the city in which they live, there are places not so different from what are now called maker spaces or what are now called sometimes Internet cafes, where they will make virtually anything and everything that their heart desires.

And I think that will lift from most people a truly enormous weight of anxiety and worry and pain. I have spent a great deal of my life working with really poor people. And I would very much like at some point to write a book about the pain of being poor. The absence of poverty will play a great role. A very great role will play the idea of people doing, to a certain measure, something that they really deeply and passionately want to do. So there will be a large, large majority of people who. It's not that they will do nothing else, but that they will also do that.

And that will make them more energetic and more cheerful and more lively. And that will make a very different culture, which I think in some ways will, of course, have something in common with Florence and with Athens and with Shakespeare and with those high points of culture where things somehow came together into a colorful firework. And I think a great deal of a colorful firework will be part of this new culture.

3:09 Mark: Yes, Dylan referred to on the episode, he tried to get you to equate the current job system with things going back to ancient Greece. And I think the connection he was trying to make was Ancient Greece was a place because of slavery, which is obviously not the strategy that we want to pursue, but then created a class of people who then became these great philosophers and politicians and all this kind of stuff. And that once the burden of having to make a living is lifted off really everyone, so that you're only spending a few hours of your day or a few hours of your week doing the things you have to to get by in that sense, then that releases this flood of energy that can then be channeled to cultural things.

3:48 Unknown speaker: Yes, I think that's absolutely right. That should be a way of thinking about our current culture. Part of the disaster, part of the calamity, part of the great waste. And I would emphasize the word waste over and over again, the great waste is that we now would have the opportunity to channel large Niagara fall of energies into being more creative and helping people to live a life that is much more cheerful than the life now that is now within our grasp. And we don't reach for it, we don't grasp it, we let it go to waste.

4:31 Mark: So this segues nicely into a couple of the other questions we received. So in one of them, Dave Buchanan asks, how can new work avoid the killing of genuine passion, creativity and curiosity? I mean, is there any kind of work that can be done without ultimately involving money or grades or some other form of social value? I'm thinking of the starving artist types. In fact, I find it very hard to believe that anyone could be passionate about making vacuum cleaners out of 3D printers. Who's going to get passionate about garbage collection and a thousand other unpleasant jobs that need to be done? Or maybe new work is mostly just an economic idea and it's not really supposed to be about meaningfulness or, or satisfying the human heart. So this was pretty obviously characterized, a misconception that I thought I'd give you the opportunity to clear up.

5:12 Unknown speaker: Thank you for the opportunity. I mean, the point is, of course, that work, all of the work can be organized so that nobody does nothing but clean toilets or nothing but drive a taxi or nothing but, et cetera, et cetera. But the idea is fundamental to new work that most fundamentally, everybody, to whatever extent we can manage, will do three different things, one of them being connected with what we now call community production, what we used to call high tech self providing. One of them being job work as before, only much, much less of it, only some hours at most during a week.

And then on top of that, the third kind of work, namely work that somebody genuinely wants to do, which already means that nobody will sort of their lifelong be cursed to do only one thing that discourages them, that burns them out, that wears them out. An example that to my mind helps is driving a taxi. That is, if you have to drive a taxi in Manhattan for the rest of your life, then that is like an execution. I mean, sooner or later that will kill you, and I mean spiritually kill you and in every other way kill you. But you could imagine somebody driving a taxi for only one summer and maybe add to it for the sake of making the point more vivid, that he will drive a taxi or she will drive a taxi with an especially good rear view mirror.

Well, driving for one summer in Manhattan, a taxi where you can really observe what's going on behind you would be an extraordinary education in social psychology or in social behavior, maybe also in sexual behavior. And so driving a taxi for three months is a totally different experience from driving it permanently a lifelong. But I think that's achievable. That is, among the devices that new work would use and can use is a whole different conception of the dimension of time, of arranging work in time very differently from how it is done now.

So that people wouldn't work longer on anything than they really want to.

7:49 Mark: Yeah. So the emphasis in your current projects and in our previous podcast was on things to help the desperately poor. But of course, most of our listeners are not themselves the desperately poor. And one of the things that most inspires them is the idea that maybe you won't have to sell your entire life to a profession. So Adam Swartz asks, are there any examples of new work taking hold within communities that are not in crisis? Folks who are making a living, but feel the pressure to put far too many hours towards work that does not energize them in order to support themselves and families?

8:22 Unknown speaker: I think that is an urgent question to ask, partly because I really want to emphasize that, yes, one dimension of new work is very much to, as I was saying a few minutes ago, to alleviate and maybe to downright abolish poverty. But that is by no means its only claim. And since the question is pointed, okay, are there communities? Well, that's very much the point, that there are numerous communities and in fact in quite a number of countries where the people most attracted to new work are very often people who do well, who are, as sometimes it is said, in the fast lane, on the fast track, and they actually do well in the current system.

But they experience their work as something that exhausts them, that drains them, that ages them, that wears them out. And so the idea comes up constantly. In fact, if I may make it somewhat picturesque, I have a somewhat distinctive appearance with my beard. And very often when I have to be on a plane or I have to be in a train, somebody accosts me and says, aren't you the person who talks about new work? And I then of course say yes. And here's the point. This very often is a person who travels first class. I only get to travel first class because I have a accumulated enough points from any number of airlines.

So they move me forward. But that's the idea that people who actually do, I mean that's quite, quite common in my experience that I, let's say to continue this little story, I am on a plane with somebody who clearly is upper management person and in every order of his being expresses that. But who then asks me, well, what do you do? And I say, well, you only have to take a good look and you'll know. And many people then say, well of course, you're a professor. And the conversation then goes on that they absolutely loathe living as they do, partly because it means that their children hate them and their wife hates them and their sexual life has dried up and all of that.

They relate to how they experience their work. And so they very much want to have a different structure of work as an alternative to what they do. Now that would be vastly superior. So I would emphasize this from wall to wall. So to say this is not a marginal, a small corner phenomenon that also some people who do well want new work. But on the contrary, it makes more sense to say new work has two great constituencies or appeals to two very large group. One group is the group of the people who are treated very niggardly by our current system. And I sometimes emphasize that's actually maybe as much as 80% of the population, but that is only one group.

There is a very large other group of people who do well in the current system but loathe it now.

11:52 Mark: We also received some questions by people inspired by what they heard and they really want to apply new work to their lives right now.

11:59 Unknown speaker: Right.

11:59 Mark: They have a calling that they want to pursue or really just are unsatisfied with a full time job and are trying to figure out how to make this work. I know that this is not something that one can give a general answer to. Let me give a little bit of an email that we got from Joshua Warish. He described the situation to us as a songwriter, an occasional teacher with his local public school board in Canada, told us how hard it is to get a permanent teaching contract. So he has no job security right now. So he asks, how does one make this calling work?

I feel called to write songs and deeply enjoy it, though. Teaching music is good, it takes me for my family and I miss my daughters growing up. Is there a way for someone to work from home and be home for these things and times? There are, as far as I can tell, only two ways out. Either increase your income or decrease your expenses. Decreasing expenses means moving toward renewable energy, getting off the grid, growing our own food, or finding ways to trade for it. And he goes on, if I may

12:50 Unknown speaker: half humorously say, there are not just two ways, there is a third way. And the third way is of course, new work. And it's intended to be a alternative in addition to those that this person outlines. And this is again one of the questions that needed to be asked. It is, of course, the very central intention of new work to make it possible for people to do three kinds of work. One is work that we call community production or high tech self providing. It has become possible in the recent past because of amazing to be celebrated technological accomplishment.

It is now possible to spend very few hours and in those very few hours produce enough value so that that part of life is taken care of. And that this has become as available to us as it now is, is incredible. I mean, I like the idea that the Greeks sometimes celebrated not just for two days, but they celebrated for two months and they were drunk for two months in celebration. And I think we should have a two month celebration of that fact that we now have the technology which allows us with very little effort, not with burning ourselves out, not with exhausting ourselves, not with neglecting our children to pick up on what he said to produce the necessities of life.

So I would emphasize radically that that is one of the downright dastardly, maybe one could even say downright demonic. One could also, of course, say insanely stupid things about our current system. That even though we do have these technologies that would make it possible for us to produce all that we need in very few hours, that is not how we have developed it. We have developed it so that as of course, everybody knows there's a huge number of people who are underemployed, I sometimes insist that that's actually if we really take a close look as much as 80%.

And that means that on the other side of this, there is a very large number of people who work way, way, way beyond anything that is really humanly called for. That Is part of the central offer, the central, maybe one could say even the central message of new work. To say stop. That we don't need, that we can provide for ourselves with very little work. And that is not only one side and then there is no other side. But that's one of the things we can do with very little of our total energy, with at most a third or a fifth of our total energy. And then in addition, we can also, in addition to providing for ourselves, we can also do something not full time.

And full time may be something that we should look at very skeptically. I would say, yeah, almost nothing really can be done very well full time. Which is another way of saying that's one of the terribly wrong things about our system. The vast majority of things should be done very much part time. And that would make people more cheerful and it would make them more energetic and it would make them more productive and it would make the economies succeed more than the economy. Economy succeeds now. So everything speaks for that.

16:23 Mark: Even writing songs 40 hours a week seems like a peculiar kind of nightmare.

16:28 Unknown speaker: You can speak to that since you write songs. And I would say, yes, that is, I can echo that similarly. I love giving talks about philosophy, obviously, but if I had to do it more than maybe four lectures a week, that's what in the university you do, at least. They treated me very nicely. And so I sort of did something like four lectures a week, maybe five. That's plenty. That's enough. More than that, maybe. Let me emphasize the word polarity. That something can be marvelous if it's done part time. And it can be demonic, it can be destructive, it can be ruinous if it's done to excess.

I would put teaching into that. Teaching some few hours a week is part of a polarity. That can be marvelous. Teaching more than you want to teach. Teaching when you know the students listening to you loathe you because you go on and on and on without real inspiration, that becomes hell. So teaching can be heaven or hell.

17:40 Mark: All right, so you're claiming that the technology is available for us to be able to do this community production. But people that want to do this as a practical matter, right now, how would you recommend? How do they sign up? Is there a franchise to this idea? Is there any kind of guidebook ready

17:57 Unknown speaker: in the first place? Again, this is an absolutely crucial question. And the answer is not just one sentence. The first thing to say is that new work is not something that one person can do in isolation. And people very often don't realize that with sufficient Clarity, that is, I by myself cannot really enact this three part tight division of work, but I can become part of a group, and even a group that isn't in every respect perfect can achieve that. A group of 60, a group of 200, in that sort of order of magnitude, that structure that we are now talking about becomes absolutely possible where different people do different things.

And there will be energy spent on being high tech, self providing and there will be energy spent on community production and there will be energy spent on making money without which nothing can be accomplished. Money is absolutely essential. But on top of that, energy and time will be set aside. And not just set aside, but on the contrary, everything will be done. Workshops will be held, seminars will be held, dialogues will be heard, art will be created to encourage, to foster in people the capacity to do something that they really want to do.

In my experience, this is an enormous pedagogic task to assist people step by step towards the recognition of the fact that there really is something that they actually very much and very passionately want to do. Most of the time that gets talked about, but in ways that, frankly I hope I can speak like that, are bullshit. That is, people think that, you know, there is something that sort of turns them on, on a whim and that's already their passion. That's nothing like their real passion. That is just a way of avoiding to really come to grips with the question of what is my passion.

So the first thing I would want to say strongly to this person is no, don't think of it as something that you can do alone. This first step is to form a group. And to form a group that in which a new work can, so to say, begin to take place. And it cannot be done all by yourself. It can only be done and with effort and probably over a period of time by a group. So that I think gives a totally different picture of what we are talking about.

20:32 Mark: Right? So folks, right now, who would want to get started? It's not a matter of probably in their community, maybe they live in a community with a new work center, but most likely not. So this means connecting with other people doing these things right now. So new work, new culture is one place to do it. There's also a new work, new culture Facebook group, there's some other things like that that people can find link from your website, but then also just starting these discussions about these ideas among their existing social circles to try to figure out if there are other people that they could coordinate with, other organizations in their community that might help the homeless maybe have a cooperative farm.

There might be a fabricator, a makerspace in your community. So there are lots of people that are potential allies in this. But you're going to have to go looking a little bit right now, I think.

21:17 Unknown speaker: Yeah, And I would actually put five exclamation marks behind that. If somebody says, but I don't know how to start, the answer is, look, start looking around you and you'll see things that help you to get started.

21:33 Mark: Next question, Rachel W. Asks. I'm wondering about how education fits in with new work. Currently in the US at least undergrad studies are expected to serve as both broad education and job training. It is difficult to do both well at the same time, but both would seem important for new work. Do we need a system of new education as well?

21:52 Unknown speaker: Boy, yes, yes, yes, yes. Is the response to that. Of course, this is not restricted to new work. I mean, I would say provocatively, there may not be anybody alive in the United States right now who doesn't agree that our system of education is a borderization, that the schools are places in which people are ruined and demented and experience horrible diseases at the age of 16 and 17, that when you experience them, like Alzheimer's when you are 70, are dreadful. But that's meant as an image that our schools give Alzheimer's to 14 year old children.

That's how wrong they are. And the ways in which they are wrong can be enumerated and spelled out in a thousand ways. But actually, I would start from the external framework in which much education happens. That is the idea of having 30 students in one classroom and having one teacher for 30 students and having a hallway with one door to the left and another door to the right and another door to the left. And behind each door There are 30 students. I mean, that is a symbol, that is a picture for something catastrophic that we have allowed to happen.

So that begins to say the alternative. We need a new education, we need a different education. It starts from saying we need entirely different buildings, we need different sizes. 30 students, so to say the worst possible size, 30 students, means that there are not enough to really be theatrical. If you're theatrical in front of 30 students, it gets embarrassing. At the same time, 30 is too many to really get sort of connected with any one student in some forceful and intimate and powerful way. So I'm trying to say, no, no, no, it's not just a question of a little too much authority, a little not the right subject there or something like this.

I'm trying to say that the most fundamental, the most elementary, the most basic things about our system of education are catastrophic. And we would need something totally and wholly different. Which for example, of course would involve much more one on one, so to say, encounter that having a mentor, well, let's say I have a daughter and I witnessed how she was somewhat dyslexic, how a single person taught her how to read. Well, that was the difference between a single person concentrating on one student and a teacher teaching 30 is absolutely marvelous, is grandiose.

And all of this, these are ways of suggesting how not in small things, but, but in the most basic things, education could be different. Of course we can go on and say that needless to say, so to say, or maybe not so needless to say, in schools people should be taught how to become self reliant, how to manufacture things, how to do what we keep calling community production. That is, community production requires that people grow their own food, but that they also make their own buildings, that they generate their own electricity, on and on and on.

To the point that we have now reached where people can build their own electric vehicles, their own electric motorcycles. Well, all of that could be taught and would not make students feel somebody's wasting my time. I've spent many, many, many hours or days or weeks consulting with different schools in many different countries. And the complaint, as always, I am bored, I feel that I'm being teased, I'm not being given anything that is real food. And so all of that are indications of how education should be changed from how it is now. So that by itself is an explosive subject.

And new work is a wonderful framework for really pursuing, not just raising, but pursuing the question, okay, what would education look like for the time we have now reached?

26:30 Mark: And just to connect a couple of the themes here, of course, even now it's a possible calling that people do in their spare time to go back and teach a class on a volunteer basis or be in the Big Brothers, Big Sisters program or any number of other ways, tutoring. So that could be a calling in itself adding to this educational edifice?

26:51 Unknown speaker: Oh, absolutely. No, absolutely, absolutely. And for many people, but similarly, really to reach the point where you have some conception of what new work is trying to accomplish if your problem is. Yeah, yeah, but I don't really see a call. Well, have a good look at the different dimensions of new work and you're very likely to come across something that you would experience as a calling and that needs doing and that can be done in the context of new work and that has to do with art and music and relationships to people and friendships and other ways of organizing one's sexuality. And on and on and on. Maybe I'll put it a little bit excessively strongly, but new work is a Pandora's box of callings. One can open the Pandora's box and find callings and more callings and more callings in every order of being and then perform them, execute them. Teaching is very much one of them.

28:02 Mark: Well, and organizing new work activities themselves, just like people volunteer in all sorts of political ways or service ways in their community, that getting these groups together to then organize community production itself can be making a difference. What you do when you go to these areas of the desperately poor and help out, that is itself a calling.

28:21 Unknown speaker: Absolutely. And quite frankly, I probably wouldn't do it if it wasn't. I don't do it out of a sense of morality or saintliness. I think I feel simply there's nothing nearly as meaningful since the question came up, what about meaning that I could do compared to that, there's nothing as thrilling, nothing as exciting, nothing as worth doing as that. And partly that is why I am impatient. And this of course have become a national obsession. Everybody these days talks about finding your passion. And I, I sometimes feel it's become reached the point where finding your passion is something like finding the excrements of a horse on the road. It's much too dirty and much too cheap and much too common.

29:12 Mark: Let me give you the next question. You know, so we often think about if you're going to pursue your calling or pursue your passion, then that involves extraordinary sacrifice. And of course one of the tasks, the social tasks of new work is to make it so that doesn't involve extraordinary sacrifice. That becomes a normal thing that you will have your basic needs taken care of. But it seems that part of the formula is that there is a lessening of the over consumption that goes into the consumer culture right now, that that's part of the waste, that's part of what can be redirected to more valuable things. So Mike Davies here asks, should those in the wealthy developed world who engage in new work expect a lifestyle of high consumption, such as the middle class in the developed world now have?

29:55 Unknown speaker: I can there give a very short and clear definite answer? Absolutely not. That is, the high consumption now has everything to do with the fact that many, many people, the vast majority of people who are doing well in whatever it is in their IT organization, they really have nothing but material acquisition or buying things or spending things as the outlet for whatever they have accumulated through their success. I experienced that even when I was starting this kind of work in Flint, Michigan, in the automobile city of Flint. What impressed me is that car workers made exceptionally good wages on every wage day.

Whenever they got that money, they would go out and shop and they would throw whatever they were buying into the back of their pickup truck. And very often it was stayed in the back of their pickup truck or it was left on the lawn. And that became, for me, a sort of symbol of the idiocy that prevails, that we earn high wages and then we spend it on things that we absolutely don't want. So what, of course, would make an enormous difference if people had something else, and that is the key word, something absolutely different, something else that they, so to say, can acquire or that they can accomplish, that can give them a sense of value.

In our current culture, buying material goods or achieving a higher salary is almost the only way in which somebody can demonstrate their superiority or their capacity or their aptitude. It's like a notch on your rifle. And that is again, something that new work utterly wants to abolish. That is, no, if you indeed are successful, then what that means is that you can pursue your calling and not that you can buy a third snowmobile, but you can figure out what it is that you seriously, passionately want to do. And that will give you much more satisfaction than the two additional snowmobiles.

And that is sort of applicable across the board, that right now, if you succeed at material accomplishment, the only thing to do with it is to go out and buy. That's ludicrous. That doesn't have to happen that way. The obvious other way to go is if you succeed, work less, Work less at something you don't want to do. Work more at something that you really want to do.

32:47 Mark: Dirk, our psychotherapist friend, asks, we are now coming to understand how social skills responsibilities, like paying attention to things that don't interest you, learning to tolerate failure, frustration, considering the wants, needs of others, et cetera, are learned or not at a fairly early age. So for the growing number of people suffering from socialization, poverty, deprivation, how will we get them up to speed so that they'll be work or training ready? You know, maybe this is just mixing together the types of work that you are putting forward. That is the calling versus the community, production versus the job. But clearly a lot of people, you know, the long term homeless, as you discuss in your book, are not well suited for traditional jobs, certainly no matter how much you train them. So how does it how is new work proposed to handle people like that?

33:34 Unknown speaker: Actually, a number of new work people have spent concentrated, focused energy on very, very early education that is especially prominent, maybe in Germany, but it actually also plays a role at the moment in Detroit, where I am right now. This is an area in which really phenomenally exciting work has been done relatively recently. I mean, there's a whole literature on how the very young brain, the brain that may even not yet be born but still be in the fetus, in the womb of the mother, how that brain can be shaped and its capacity can be improved and it can be altered and educated.

And it's phenomenal. What I mean, this actually has even descended down to the level of political discussion that for example, in Ohio and a few other states there is now vivid discussion on shouldn't there be education for children before they go to kindergarten? Very early education. And that's a reflection of what we are talking about. There is, I think, a greatly increased awareness, as you were saying, of the need for this. But at the same time there's an, a very concentrated, maybe a better word is a very energetic effort to start education, for heaven's sakes, not at the point at which is already too late, which may be when we are five, that is to start education at a very early age.

And this is a field that again, we were just talking about this. Somebody may be looking for a calling, very early education, how to deal very differently with 2 and 3 year olds from how we have so far done that, that might turn into somebody's calling and might be rejuvenating, might be thrilling as a task. So I would briefly say this absolutely can be done and not just it can be done. It in fact is in the process of being done, unfortunately not quite yet oriented in the direction of helping people to discover their best capacities and to realize them, very often simply oriented towards them becoming successful in the job work we now have.

36:09 Mark: So there's a lot of question about how new work programs relate to legislation, and one listener asked that. We talked a little bit on the last podcast about how the biggest legislative blockade is corporations with too much power that are threatening to move jobs away. And so once we're less reliant on jobs, then we'd have a way of check on that power. This listener, Dylan, asks, how successful can new work initiatives be with the backdrop of social programs such as unemployment insurance, Medicaid, electronic benefit transfer, and in fact, I'll add the minimum income in Switzerland if that were to pass?

He asks, can there be true Motivation for new work in communities filled with those receiving thousands a month in benefits. So in other words, are these aid programs an enemy in any way? Or are these really. I recall a book that you had known the author, André Gorz, who had, in fact, advocated something very much like this Minimum income. That that's the way to free us up so that we could pursue a calling. But that's certainly not something you emphasize. Is there any really relationship between these things?

37:15 Unknown speaker: I think the idea of a minimum guaranteed income, especially if they emphasize, as they do, no preconditions, but minimum guaranteed for everybody. I maintain staunchly that that is a downright stupid idea and destructive, harmful idea. And the experience in my life that connects with that is having worked with a number of Indian tribes in the north of Canada and Alaska and places like that, that is, in Canada, the emphasis on providing the Native people with the wherewithal as a way of compensating for the guilt of having mistreated them worse than mistreated, having robbed them of everything is very powerful.

But I have worked in places where people have a guaranteed minimum income. And the upshot is alcoholism. The upshot is violence. The upshot is unbelievable depressions. So this idea of giving people a monthly income and expecting that that will already make somehow for positive results is ludicrously ignorant of the actual circumstances. That what most people who have any notion of the world, so to say, realize that what is needed is much, much more than, to put it bluntly, than just money. So, okay, maybe a minimum income. All right, all right.

So to say. But only if this is embedded in a context where a great, great deal is done to assure that the income that is now provided can be intelligently used, that it will be intelligently used, that it will be used creatively and productively. The experience of my life is a little more rich and diverse than that of maybe at least some other professors. So let me say this. Take drug addiction. Well, anybody who knows anything about drug addiction knows that if you just give money to somebody who is addicted, well, you should know damn well what happens.

I mean, that buys the next fix, and that's all there is to it. And if you give more money, there'll be another fix. So I know this idea of some kind of guaranteed minimum income is not a completely new idea, but has been discussed for some time. It may even be given some kind of trial in Switzerland. But I am violently skeptical about it.

39:59 Mark: Well, it sounds like you're skeptical not of the aid programs themselves, but that that would be Seen as sufficient to steer people. Wouldn't you still be in favor of decoupling having to work for a living from bare survival? That it would be nice, certainly legislatively, at least in affluent places that can afford this to provide for the barrier for survival. And then of course, as you're suggesting, build upon that an educational program and other things so that people will do intelligent things. Or is it you just don't see these aid programs as productive at all?

40:34 Unknown speaker: I'm glad you said this. I mean, this now could have gone very wrong and you corrected it. That is, I don't by any means take the view that some people, of course do, that all social programs are harmful or a waste of time or something between those two? Not at all. I mean, I think of new work instead as a very encompassing framework that gives us as a framework, as something that is large and encompassing, an orientation, a vivid sense of what could be done at this point and of what are just small gestures that don't really measure what could be done.

But I think that all kinds of things, I mean, including bartering and including all manner of different things. Right now I'm in Detroit and maker spaces are in evidence. And on and on and on. The idea is that actually I think of it quite the other way around, that all the different social programs, including of course, all kinds of programs with youth and with children and with drug addiction and whatnot, they are all a part of what new work requires. That is the idea of assisting people to the point where they, in a focused and concentrated way can do something that they feel passionately about.

That's an enormously high placed goal. And almost anything that we have done so far in the way of social programs could be thought of as augmenting the accomplishment of that goal.

42:21 Mark: Right. So providing new technologies in itself, the fabricators are not cheap. Things like that, setting these things up. How do you get the facilities to get a community farm going? None of this can be done without resources, obviously. So aid programs are certainly welcome.

42:37 Unknown speaker: Absolutely. But at the same time, the general dynamic has to be understood and strikes me as very important. The general large scale dynamic is that it's not just that fabricators are becoming cheaper, but that the program of becoming economically independent of providing the materials and the tools and the machines and whatever else that enable people to make virtually anything that they really, really need for a cheerful Mozart music like life from month to month that increases, so that becomes easier and easier and easier. That's the one side of the dynamic that is the goal of achieving what we call economic independence or community production that becomes more and more reachable with every month.

And the opposite is true of what's happening in the job system. The job system becomes ever more difficult, as you yourself also know, and some of the people we've been having conversations with. It becomes ever more difficult in a job to do something that is really meaningful, or even to find a job, or even to do a job, find a job that pays reasonably. That is, there is this opposition, there is this conflict, there is this radical one side and other side, there is the dynamic of high tech self providing or community production which leaps forward and becomes ever more easy and ever more attainable.

And on the other side, there is the job system in which to live with satisfaction becomes ever more difficult.

44:30 Mark: We received several requests for you to clarify the relation of new work to Marxism and also to the anarchist tradition. Would you like to address this? For instance, Leonard Williams asked, do you seek to downplay these connections in order to reach out to corporate and foundation sectors of the economy?

44:48 Unknown speaker: A very short answer is to some extent I do want to downplay them. But let me explain. I wrote in detail about my experience of socialism. That is, I as a young, very young person, was of course a communist, as at that point many people were. But then, unlike quite a few other people, I traveled in the countries, had adopted socialism. And I have very often said that experience was somewhat like the experience of the death of God. Because I traveled in Hungary, I traveled in Czechoslovakia, I traveled in the Ukraine, I traveled in China, and on and on and on.

And the one most marked experience was that even in restaurants, even waiters, even on trains, the conductors looked so utterly unmotivated and so completely exhausted and cynical and dispassionate about their work. I felt that work under socialism had become laughably the opposite of what one had imagined and hoped for. So that became for me an absolute turning point. I decided that whatever was worth doing, it was not somehow rejuvenating or warming up or making more accessible one more time, aspects of socialism. Maybe that was somewhat different in my case from other people.

That experience helped me. I'm very grateful to that experience. I'm not attributing this to any special talent or anything like that, but it simply meant that that door was closed. That is, that sky had fallen down with a tremendous crash of splintering glass. There was nothing left of that. And I felt, okay, that's good. There's an opportunity to start fresh. And so, yes, New Work was, from its first inception, an effort to do Something new and different and start afresh, not build on what had been said before, but to whatever extent separate whatever I was trying to do from what had been done before, to make a sharp cut, to use an accents, no, splinter apart those things.

And so yes, that does play a role even in the language I use, that I avoid to whatever degree I can, any of the terms, right down to terms like solidarity, the language that is the stock and trade of socialism. I honestly do think that socialism, it is incredible to me, it is unbelievable. It is the kind of thing where actually you could tear the skin of your body in exasperation, that I don't know how many millions sacrificed their life, their idealism, their hopes, their ambition, their youth, their God knows what, all of it, because they believed in socialism.

And how could that ever have happened? How could that stupidity ever have occurred that there weren't people who said, now wait a minute, stop, stop, stop. The idea of being. Basically making it so that the state, in one form or another can control the means of production. To imagine that if the state owns a factory, that that improves the experience of work in that factory. I mean, there should have been laughter from one hall to the other hall in all factories when that was announced. That. That is just. It is disgraceful. It is the kind of thing where in response to that, one should not have just thrown tomatoes, one should have thrown watermelons, because it is all really that crass and stupid in its basic approach.

And that doesn't mean that Marx wasn't an enormously gifted writer and this, that and the other thing. But I would argue against any number of people who felt, well, the ideas were very good. It just was that too much bureaucracy ruined it all. No, no, not by any means. Absolutely not. I would say crassly and bluntly, Marx didn't spend enough time listening to workers. He spent much too much time in the library in London. So socialism, to my mind, is not just something that failed because it somehow in its realization went a little bit awry because there were too many bureaucratic people or too many people like Honecker, or too many people like Stalin, of course, and so forth and so on.

No, no, no, no. I would say from its inception, from the things that Marx himself wrote, not from any commentaries, not from anything derivative. It's in his own writing that the stupidities are committed. I will say just partly with a little bit of humor, but also in all seriousness, I'm inviting people, I would ask you look at the capital quite a few pages now. Check for your own Satisfaction. How many pages does capital actually describe in detail the society that is supposed to be achieved? Very few pages. Maybe six or eight pages. So, no, no, no.

The separation from socialism was absolutely deliberate and intended. And that is meaningful even now. Because if anybody comes and says, yeah, well, new work has its thing, so to say, but what we really need is something much closer to socialism that would really change society. On the contrary. No, it's the opposite. New work promises a much more dramatic alteration, a vastly more profound revolution, evolution, transformation, transfiguration, than socialism could ever have dreamt of.

51:25 Mark: One of our listeners, Bear, asks, is your vision a utopian one? And if so, would that lead to the problems of all past social attempts to create a utopia, which inevitably have led to gulags and other horrible things?

51:42 Unknown speaker: Of course, without question and without beating around the bush and trying to soft pedal it new work is a utopian conception. It is an effort to lay out steps in detail, steps, many of which have been tested and quite a number of which have at this point been downright accomplished. That, yes, are utopian in the sense that they would result in a society that both in the large number of people, but also in individual people would be enormously better than we have now. I don't know whether most, let alone all, utopian efforts have produced gulags.

What has impressed me a great deal throughout my efforts to think about this are really much of what has been done in this area strikes me as not impressive, not really intelligent. Honestly, I used to teach Plato, I don't know how many years the Republic. And that as a metaphor or as a blueprint for a state, seems to me just calamitous. And most utopias seem to me, as I was just saying about Marx, that is really. It's disgraceful. So my actual position, if I may say it like that, is that we should face up to the fact that much of this, even when it was done by preeminent people, has not been a succession of really serious efforts.

That this is something where we are raw, where we need to begin, where the effort to really think through what steps would lead to an improved society, that is an enterprise where we are beginners and new work is an effort to be part of a new beginning in this. And I don't for a moment think that it would have to lead to gulags and to prisons and to concentration camps. Nothing like it. If it is word done intelligently, it could finally lead to some improvement. What appalls me is that for the last at least 2000 years we have talked and talked and talked, obviously partly under the aegis of Christianity, about a new life, a new man, a new society.

But we have not come at all closer to that. So I think we should be ashamed of what we have so far failed to do, but get busy doing something worth doing.

54:25 Mark: I would argue that your vision is not utopian in that new work. There's no claim that it's a panacea, that yes, a lot of people's problems are caused by the fact that they have to sell their lives in this way, that so much of their energy is spent on things that destroy them, and that, as you said, the amount of energy released, if that was not the case, would be enormous. But of course, given that there's still petty jealousies and all sorts of political infighting and many other of the conflicts of the ages, there's no claim that human nature will be remade to remove all these things, that that human nature is perfectible or anything like that.

55:04 Unknown speaker: No, absolutely not.

55:06 Mark: Earlier today, Dylan Casey, our podcaster, I was asking if anybody among the Partially Examined Life podcasters had more questions and he had asked sort of a vague question about the techne of when you do have this time to fill. It's not even just a matter of discovering your calling. It's a matter of a lot of energy and strategy to go into self motivating and all sorts of things. And so there are enormous problems to be solved. Just like when we were talking last time about the psychological problems of people discovering their calling and being motivated over and above that new work is really just a framework to provide a certain set of material circumstances.

But then there needs to be a lot of the energy of the culture that will then be freed up to channel this energy and deal with ourselves as individuals. That what Nietzsche, who provides one of the models that you use for individual self development, had a picture of a self as highly internally conflicted and that there are a lot of challenges and overcomings involved in being an individual that are maybe not there when you just do what society tells you. So this is a. It opens up a whole new area of challenge as well as of success.

56:17 Unknown speaker: Absolutely.

56:18 Mark: Thank you all for listening. We hope you enjoyed this. If you want to hear more questions and answers with Frithjof, we're potentially willing to do more of these, but we'd like to know if you've got questions, if you've got areas you'd like further discussed, really, if this is something you want to hear more about. So you could go to partiallyexaminelife.com and make a comment on this episode post. Or you could email me through the website there, or fritchow through newwork newculture.com or join the Facebook group called New Work, New Culture.

And note, there is no space between new and work and no space between new and culture. So it's new work space, New culture. If you can look that up, you'll see most of the posts there are in German right now, but that will be changing, especially as we get more folks from the English speaking world signed up to that. So that's a great place to join up and share information, get the latest news of what's going on in the different new work enterprises. Thank you, Frithjof. Thanks everybody. So long.

57:15 Unknown speaker: Thank you, Mark. Thanks everybody. So long. All right.