Civilized man has developed the incredible technique of symbolization—of words (which represent things and events), of numbers (which represent patterns and arrangements of physical nature), of social institutions (laws, states, family patterns), and so on. And in these terms he represents the physical world in the same way the menu represents the dinner. But he has been so fascinated by the power of this symbolic way of looking at things that he very easily confuses it with what it represents, and so has a tendency to eat the menu instead of the dinner.
When we suggest the very idea that money doesn’t matter, people feel deeply insecure. And if we should go further than that and suggest such outrageous ideas as that, in the year 2000 A.D., there will no longer be taxation, that all utilities will be free, and that every citizen—instead of having to pay his taxes—will receive from the government a guaranteed basic income, people say, “Where’s the money going to come from?” As if money were something that came from somewhere in the same way as iron, or hydroelectric power, or lumber, or just plain energy. Money doesn’t come from anywhere and never did! Money is an invention in the same way that inches and hours and clocks and rulers are inventions. That is: money is a measure of wealth.
When, for example, people think that gold is wealth, and use gold for money, gold being used for money becomes immediately useless for anything else. It is locked up in just plain ingots, doing nothing in banks and fortresses, and is of no material value whatsoever. But the trouble is that we, who pride ourselves on being a materialistically-minded people, and are sometimes even ashamed of ourselves for being that, are not materialists in any sense whatsoever. We are high abstractionists. We are concerned with money, with status, with what we are called, what people say about us, with this whole mess of verbiage, and are very badly related indeed to any kind of physical natural reality.
If you create a technology, and the purpose of that technology is to increase our supply of goods and services, and to make it unnecessary for anybody to perform drudgery, then, of course, you’re getting rid of work. So we have the amazing idiocy to penalize getting rid of work as something called “unemployment:” to be on the lower social status in which you crawl into a labor office and regretfully receive a dole.
Consciousness is a peculiar neurological phenomenon which gets bored rather easily. So that when a certain stimulus is given to consciousness for a period of time, it ceases to notice it. And then, for lack of anything to do, it seeks out another one. And therefore, the people who are permanently comfortable, they cease to notice that they’re comfortable.
The ecologist knows that a human being (or any other organism) is not something that comes into this world from somewhere else, but is an expression of it; grows out of it like fruit from the tree. And it’s absolutely imperative that we realize this.