Alan Watts': Revealing the Truth About Jobs and Money with Drone Cinematic Footage

I wonder often if there's any relationship between guilt and gold that the love of money is the root of evil it's very true saying because you see uh I was saying yesterday that the difference between having a job and having a vocation is that a job is some unpleasant work you do in order to make money with the soul purpose of making money and uh there are plenty of jobs because there is still a certain amount of dirty work that nobody wants to do and that therefore they will pay someone to do it there is

essentially less and less of that kind of work because of mechanization but if you do a job if you do a job with the sole purpose of making money you are absurd because if money becomes the goal and it does when you work that way you begin increasingly to confuse it with happiness or with pleasure yes one can kick a whole handful of crisp dollar bills and practically water your mouth over them but this is as kind of a person who is confused like a pavlof dog who salivates on the wrong Bell it it goes

back you see to the ancient guilt that if you don't work you have no right to eat that if there are others in the world who don't have enough to eat you shouldn't enjoy your dinner even though you have no possible means of conveying the food to them and uh while it is true that we are all one human family and that every individual involves every other individual while it is true therefore we should do something about changing the situation the one way of not doing anything about a situation is feeling guilty about it because

when people feel guilty about a situation they you most usually instead of doing something practical to change it they resort to all sorts of symbolic methods of experation they go to confession uh they uh see an analyst they uh do all kinds of things which will be ways of actually not doing anything about the problem but feeling all right about it instead and guilt invariably produces that sort of reaction it is a destructive emotion and uh instead uh we we need to have a different attitude to our mistakes and to our misdeeds Walt Whitman always

admired animals because they do not lie awake at night and weep for their sins our animals are practical in the real sense as our children who haven't been taught uh this extraordinary uh hangup of guilt because if you have done something wrong and you have made a mistake and somebody makes you ashamed of it and guilty you run around licking the SS of your wounded ego because you feel your pride has been hurt the first thing to understand is that it is not a serious failing in a human being to make mistakes everybody has to

make mistakes there is no way out of it you can't learn anything unless you make mistakes we find for example in Japan the Japanese have a terrible hang-up about making mistakes they uh therefore never have the courage to practice their English properly they've had seven years of English in school most of it very very badly taught and it's irrelevant English they learn uh all about Shakespeare and uh uh Dickens and thery and uh Thomas Hardy and so on and therefore they can't carry on an everyday conversation it's like the way the English study French all

about pens of gardener ants and things like that and uh so but they are ashamed to try out their English unless drunk so if you want to get into conversation with the Japanese in English you have to go to bars and then they say University students and so on there Will loosen up and talk because they no longer have the inhibition the shame of saying the wrong thing so likewise I know a very great Anthropologist who was taught music playing the piano in the same way I was when I was taught music uh the school

mom who taught me used to put an India rubber an eraser it's called in this country on the top of each hand so that I would have my hands in good posture and every time I'd play a wrong note she'd hit my fingers with a pencil and this great Anthropologist that had a similar sort of uh musical education and when confronted with a piano in the presence of an absolutely marvelous teacher in San Francisco she said she was amazed he was completely incapable of reading notes he blocked at everything so uh another great uh teacher

of the piano I knew said simply you must not be afraid of playing wrong notes uh just uh forget it uh play it wrong and then uh eventually go over it again and uh you'll eventually get it right but you must not block uh always keep the same rhythm going even if you have to slow it down but keep the proportionate rhythm of one note to another and if it's the wrong note play the wrong note as long as you play something in the right rhythm so you know this is a way of taking away

people's blockage people's guilt and shame about making mistakes so you absolutely Freedom means basically the freedom to make mistakes the freedom to be a damn fool and then not to recriminate with yourself when you do finally realize that it was a mistake but simply don't do it again or at least do it less often so you know this is the puzzle when you uh go to confession in the Catholic Church which is an enormous method of inculcating a sense of guilt very subtle uh one says of course that Catholics are on the whole less guilty

than Protestants they're more uh relaxed and there's some truth in that but only some Protestants of course uh have chronic guilt and you can work this out by a very simple little formula that um when the Protestants in England abandoned what is called oric confession uh to a priest they inserted in their prayer book a general confession uh in which the congregation all made its confession together now what does a Catholic say when he makes his confession the formula is I confess to God Almighty to blessed Mary ever virgin Blessed John the Baptist the Holy

Apostles Peter and Paul and all the saints that I have sinned exceedingly in thought word and deed by my fault by my own fault by my own most Grievous fault wherefore I beg blessed Mary Etc and you father to pray for me to the Lord Our God and uh the priest says almighty God have mercy upon you forgive you your sins and to everlasting life by the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ committed unto me I absolve thee from all thy sins in the name of the father and of the son and of the Holy

Spirit perod now instead of that what they had to introduce uh into the Anglican formulary was instead of this very simple confession of sins uh and before the whole company of Heaven an absolute gravel wherein they say that they have sinned so horribly and that um the remembrance of these sins is Grievous unto us the burden of them is intolerable have mercy upon us have mercy upon us most merciful father and all this cringing and crying breast beating and wallowing in guilt and then the priest instead of saying a uh simple formula of absolution quotes

all kind of scriptural texts to prove from the Bible that those who do truly and earnestly repent will be forgiven by God because they're very UN about it therefore they have to quote all the authorities and this absolutely gring form of uh confession replaces the old one because they were a little bit scared about abandoning direct confession of sins to the priest but now that the the the going back to the Catholic problem about guilt uh you say when you have confessed after saying this formula about uh to all the saints you confess the specific

sins you've committed and you know I stole something committed adultery three times and so on whatever it was and uh then you say at the end for these and all my sins which I cannot now remember [Laughter] M I firmly purpose Amendment and humbly ask pardon of God and of you father Absolution uh now I firmly purpose amendment that is where the fly and the ointment consists because uh the doctrine is that you have made a True Confession if at the same time you have a sear intention of acting differently in the future now no

sensitive Catholic can say that without having grave doubts as to whether actually he isn't going to do some of these things again so if you're a worker day Catholic uh like a Mexican peasant or something like that you know that the confession is just a safety valve you're going to go on living just as uh um lacad desically as ever and but you go to church every so often and you get rid of the uh of the of the guilt of the evil it's like going to the bathroom but when you get to thought get

thoughtful about these things and you wonder whether you do really mean what you say whether your motive is pure and your intention is right you get into a rightful hangup and one of the reasons that our technology is impeded and prevented from feeding the world properly is the failure of one of our networks it's an Information Network and it's called money about which we have the most unbelievable superstitions and psychological blocks which have been gone into at some length by Freud who equates our valuation of money with our attitude to excrement and uh a very

complicated lot of complexes grow up around that but money and our psychological attitude to money uh is a major obstacle to a proper development of Technology enabling it to do what it is supposed to do that is to save labor and to produce Goods services and so on adequately so I must introduce this with a story which is entirely legendary indeed quite apocryphal the great banks of the world at one time got absolutely sick of the expense and security measures involved in shipping Consignments of gold from One bank to another and so they decided that

all the chief banks of the world would open uh offices on a certain island in the South Pacific which was barmy and comfortable and there they would store all the gold in the world and they put it in Great Subterranean vaults reached by Deep elevator shafts and uh then all they had to do when one bank or one country owed gold to another was to trundle it across the street and this was very efficient and it went on beautifully for five or six years and then the presidents of the world Banks got together and said

let's have a convention out on this island and take our wives and families so about 7 years from the date of opening all those presidents and their wives and families went out to the Pacific island and they inspected the books and everything was beautifully in order then the children said Oh Daddy can't we see the gold they said of course you may see the gold and they said to the managers let's take our children down to the vaults and show them the gold and the manager said well um uh it's it's a little bit inconvenient

at this time and uh perhaps the children would um um not really be very interested after all it's just only old plain gold and the man and the president said oh no no come now uh they' be thrilled let's let's go down and see and there was further humming and and delays and finally it came out that uh a few years before there had been a catastrophic Subterranean earthquake and all the vaults had been swallowed up and all the gold had disappear but so far as the bookkeeping was concerned everything was in perfect [Laughter] [Music]

order uh what this means then is that money is nothing but bookkeeping it is figures it is a way of measuring uh what you owe the community and what the community owes you it is of course as you all know a substitute for barter if you worked on a farm and the farmer paid you in terms of ears of corn onions cabbages and other veget vegetables and yet you wanted a pot and pan of some kind and you took a few vegetables over to the man who so made pots and pans and you swapped uh

some people used uh cowry shells to stand for money so that you wouldn't have to barter and carry around all these inconvenient loads of U of goods and then uh of course gold was used because gold was rare and because gold was supposed to have a constant value uh you might Ponder the question when a banker buys gold with what does he pay for it the answer is a mystery called credit credit is bookkeeping and uh as the economy of the Western World develops it was found that there was not enough gold around if it

were to remain constant in value to exchange goods and services you could of course have changed the picture by putting down the price of goods and services to uh keep Pace with the amount of gold in circulation but nobody will ever put down the price there's something in our psychology whereby prices always tend to go up but at the same time therefore because uh the amount of gold in the world did not provide an adequate channel for the circulation of goods and services uh all great industrial Nations went heavily into debt they created a thing

called the national debt which year by year gets bigger and bigger and bigger to the horror and consternation of old-fashioned Republicans who pay their bills but the reason for the increase of the national debt is extremely obvious it is that in an with an expanding gross national product there needs to be more and more money uh that is to say tokens of Exchange in order to circulate the amount of goods produced which is ever increasing now I'm not an economist and I can refer you to the work of those who really are but any fool

can see certain extremely fundamental Al principles about this whole situation and I'm speaking of the thought today of a man called Robert Theobald who sort of ties in with the general picture of people like mcluhan and Buckminster Fuller in having very far out thoughts and very adventurous thoughts about what we should do about money but he is in the following of a man like Frederick Saudi who was a Nobel Prize chemist who was one of the first people to think really freshly about economics or people like Sylvio gasel in Austria and major Douglas in England

uh he's in that following and the proposition that he puts forward is very simple that money is a circulation of information and in itself has no value gold of course has some value it has some value for industry and some value for dentistry and some value for jewelry but as a means of exchanging the goods and services of the world it is as primitive as uh post horses for carrying the mail we must recognize then that money is a pure abstraction I was on a television show a little while ago with um Ted senson and

Raymond Moy and they were having a long long discussion which sounded like something that goes on in a smoke filled back room of uh party bosses where they were talking about the prospects for the Republican democratic parties in 1968 and then they got onto the question of Automation and the problems of unemployment that it was making and the difficulties of transferring workers from this to that when they were only trained for this finally I said the trouble with you gentlemen is you still think money is real and they looked at me and sort of said

oh someone who doesn't think money is real because every now anybody knows money is money and it's very important but uh it just isn't real at all because it has the same relationship to real wealth that is to say to actual goods and services that words have to meaning that words have to the physical world and as words are not the physical world money is not wealth it only is an accounting of available energy economic energy now what happens then when you introduce technology into production you produce enormous quantities of goods by technological methods but

at the same time you put people out of work you can say oh but it always creates more jobs there will always be more jobs yes but they will be lots of them will beutal jobs they will be jobs making every kind of frippery and unnecessary Contraption and one will also at the same time have to beguile the public into feeling that they need and want these completely unnecessary things that aren't even be beautiful and therefore an enormous amount of nonsense employment and busy work bureaucratic and otherwise it has to be created in order to

keep people working because we believe as good Protestants that the devil finds work for Idle Hands to do but the basic principle of the whole thing has been completely overlooked that the purpose of the machine is to make drudgery unnecessary and if we don't allow it to achieve its purpose we live in a constant state of self- frustration so then if a given manufacturer automates his plant and dismisses his labor force and they have to uh operate on a very much diminished income say some sort of Dole the manufacturer suddenly finds that the public does

not have the wherewithal to buy his products and therefore he has invested in this expensive autom automative Machinery to no purpose and therefore obviously uh the public has to be provided with the means of purchasing what the machines produce but people say that's not fair where's the money going to come from who's going to pay for it the answer is the machine the machine pays for it because the machine works for the manufacturer and for the community this is not saying you see that uh this is not the uh statist uh communist idea that uh

you expropriate the manufacturer and say you can't own and run this Factory anymore it is owned by the government it is only saying that the government or the people have to be responsible for issuing to themselves sufficient credit to circulate the goods they are producing and have to balance the measuring standard of money with the gross national product that means that taxation is obsolete completely obsolete it ought to go the other way theal points out that every individual should be assured of a minimum income now you see that absolutely horrifies most people say all these

wastal these people who uh are out of job because they're really lazy see uh given them money yeah because otherwise the machines can't work they come to blockage this was the situation of the Great Depression when here we were still in a material sense a very rich country with plenty of fields and farms and mines and factories everything going but suddenly because of a psychological hang-up because of a mysterious uh mumbo jumbo about uh the the economy about the banking we were all miserable and poor Starving in the midst of Plenty just because of a

psychological hangup and that hang-up is that money is real and that uh uh people ought to suffer in order to get it but the whole point of the machine is to relieve you of that suffering is an Ingenuity you see we are psychologically back in the 17th century and technically in the 20th and here comes the problem so uh what we have to find out how to do is to change the psychological attitude to money and to wealth and furthermore to pleasure and furthermore to the nature of work and this is a formidable problem it

requires the best uh brains in public relations in propaganda in all that kind of thing in all the media television radio newspapers everything to try to get across a message to to the vast general public about what money is you see the difficulty is this when the public suspects that the money that is being issued the dollar bills being issued by the government are only paper and stand only for paper they start putting up prices so you get an inflationary situation where the more paper money there is the higher and higher and higher the prices

go which is uh a very stupid psychological maneuver and people have to be persuaded uh the least effective way of persuading people is passing laws but they have to be persuaded somehow not to put up the prices but to play fair with each other