Datasets:
eliwill
/
Watts

Dataset card Data Studio Files Community
text
stringlengths
11
1.23k
Large adults and small adults. And the difficulty was that industrial revolution, the various problems—number one, children were terribly exploited in the factories. Number two, it was necessary to keep them off the labor market, because they could undercut the prices of adult labor.
So it became necessary to erect dams through which the flow of population would be arrested, and these are called schools, where you’re simply delayed in growing up. Every healthy child wants to grow up. And therefore, a little girl or a little boy will immediately be interested in what its father and mother are doing, and will want to handle the tools, all the appurtenances of its parents’ lives.
And that’s very natural and proper, and in certain so-called primitive civilizations this is positively encouraged. And little boys go hunting with their fathers. You can still see this among Indians in Mexico.
Little boys working alongside their fathers, little girls working alongside their mothers, getting a true apprenticeship in whatever it is that their father or mother does, what is their vocation in life. But in industrial civilization this isn’t very easy. Because imagine a banker’s clerk bringing a little boy along to the office with him to the bank, and looking over daddy’s shoulder and seeing what he’s doing, and helping him out.
We don’t want children around here! And then mothers, when they come home to cook in the evening, are pretty harassed. Because what happens in the ordinary American suburban family in the late afternoon when the children return from school?
All sorts of things. It may be that the mother has to chauffeur not only her own children, but stacks of others as well—to a dancing class, to a painting class, to a party, to a something or other. Or else she’s got a job part-time, or else she’s got a bridge club, or a meeting of some kind—League of Women Voters.
And she manages to make home shortly after the children are back from school. And by that time what has been done, see, to keep the children away from adult concerns is to propitiate them with toys, which are fake adult instruments. These toys are are increasingly made of plastic and are extraordinarily easy to break.
So in the late afternoon any good suburban house is totally littered from end to end with broken plastic. You know, disemboweled dolls, wrecked tinker toy sets strewn all over the place. And so mama knows that all this has to be cleaned up before the tired husband gets home for dinner.
So she has a knock-down drag-out battle with all these children to put this stuff away, to fling it into the bottom of a closet mixed up with sucked lollipops and bubblegum. And then her disposition is absolutely worn out. She has no heart for cooking dinner.
So what she does is: she gets the children out of the way by sitting them down in front of the television with hotdogs and ice cream and Coca Cola. You know, great education! They have barbarous taste in food, you see.
They’ve no taste at all, because that’s just what they’re brought up with. And no wonder they go for a macrobiotic diet later on! You know, it’s just the most terrible stuff!
And so then she’s got really no heart to cook. You can’t cook on a frazzled disposition, because you have to approach it with great love and delight. So the husband gets home, and he’s supposed to be a real pal for the kids, and they hardly know each other.
And maybe he reads them a story while she’s getting together a warmed-up TV dinner so that they can watch the thing. But, you see, in all this the children have absolutely no part in their parents’ life. They live in a dormitory building.
They’re brought up by other children. They go away to school where they’re taught everything and nothing. A purely cerebral education which trains them to be bureaucrats, and which doesn’t train in any of the really essential arts of life, which are farming, cooking, clothing, house-building, and lovemaking.
These are five fundamental relationships to the physical world which we absolutely neglect in education. So the thing is, then, that the children are taught there is a distinction in life between work and play. And you, as children, are really basically playing.
Childhood—so many mothers say, “All I want for my children is that they be happy.” One long, sunny childhood, you know? And so a lot of people who got thrown into life quickly start griping that they never really had a childhood—you know, that sort of thing. Lucky for them they didn’t!
But all this thing now is finally epitomized in Disneyland. Disneyland is what we think of our children, of what they ought to have and what’s good for them. Disneyland is an absolute compound of fakes from beginning to end.
Even the birds on the trees are made of plastic and warble through tiny loudspeakers which go through their hinged beaks. There are plastic animals all along the banks of the artificial rivers monotonously wagging their empty heads. There are plastic Indians who are chopping like this for ever and ever and ever.
Why, you can go on a jungle voyage in the waters and thrill to the spectacle of a plastic hippopotamus rising its head out of the waters and being killed with a blank cartridge. There is a papier-mâché varnished model of the tree of the Swiss Family Robinson’s house which vibrates constantly to an umm-pa-pa band going boppity boppity boppity boppity boppity boppity boppity boppity boppity boppity forever. It’s on a loop tape.
And there is nothing in the whole area in the way of—you know, it takes hours to get through the exhibits. And there isn’t a bar in the place! It’s all strictly popcorn, soda pop culture.
And it’s a grizzly place! You know, it’s all plastic! But it’s all cutey-pie.
It’s all tweetie-tweetie. It’s all kind of a cultural baby talk. The whole thing!
And so this is what happens, then. You get a child. And instead of facing this thing and saying: now listen.
How do you do? Welcome to the human race. We’ve been here around for some time, and we’re playing this game.
And it’s only fair that we explain you the rules of what we’re doing. Because when you get bigger you may think of better ones. But instead of being straight with a child like that, we say, “Tweetie, tweetie, tweetie, tweetie,” and make it into a doll, a bauble.
Well, this is absolutely ridiculous, because the children can’t make out what’s hit us. You know, they come into the world wide-eyed, and then find they’re greeted by somebody who says, “Tweetie, tweetie, tweetie.” You know how it is when you make up to a child. You say, “Well, fella!
How are you?” And all that. The child looks like…. You know, they’re so straight in the ordinary way, and so simple.
But adults feel that they have to make this sort of big act. You know, I’ll never forget that movie in which Laurel and Hardy were involved. They got loaded on some train with a squawling brat, and here was Hardy, a great fat fellow, playing with his necktie, waving to this baby, who wouldn’t be pacified at all.
But that’s it, you know—wave a necktie or something. Children, you see, are not taken sincerely. They are treated as toys; given toys.
The whole world is toyland, Disneyland. But this a way, you see, then, of postponing their participation in life, of frustrating their great eagerness to do what we’re all doing and to get mixed up with it. And, as I said, this pretty much seems to have begun with the nineteenth century, because it wasn’t long before that that there was a prime minister of England at the age of 22.
That’s just about unthinkable today. It may. And yet, you see, in those days, those people who survived until 27 or whatever it was usually went on.
If they got that far, they usually went on to quite an old age. It was a higher death rate in the earlier period of life. Let’s take a break.
I find it a little difficult to say what the subject matter of this seminar is going to be, because it’s too fundamental to give it a title. I’m going to talk about what there is. Now, the first thing, though, that we have to do is to get our perspectives with some background about the basic ideas—which as Westerners, living today in the United States—influence our everyday common sense, our fundamental notions about what life is about.
And there are historical origins for this which influence us more strongly than most people realize. Ideas of the world which are built into the very nature of the language we use, and of our ideas of logic, and of what makes sense altogether. And these basic ideas I call myth, not using the word ‘myth’ to mean simply something untrue, but to use the word ‘myth’ in a more powerful sense.
A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world. And we, at present, are living under the influence of two very powerful images which are—in the present state of scientific knowledge—inadequate, and one of our major problems today is to find an adequate, satisfying image of the world. Well, that’s what I’m going to talk about—and I’m going to go further than that.
Not only what image of the world to have, but how we can get our sensations and our feelings in accordance with the most sensible image of the world that we can manage to conceive. Alright. Now, the two images which we have been working under for two thousand years—and maybe more—are what I would call two models of the universe, and the first is called the ceramic model, and the second the fully automatic model.
The ceramic model of the universe is based on the Book of Genesis, from which Judaism, Islam, and Christianity derive their basic picture of the world. And the image of the world in the Book of Genesis is that the world is an artifact. It is made, as a potter takes clay and forms pots out of it, or as a carpenter takes wood and makes tables and chairs out of it.
Don’t forget: Jesus is the son of a carpenter. And also the son of God. So the image of God and of the world is based on the idea of God as a technician, potter, carpenter, architect, who has in mind a plan, and who fashions the universe in accordance with that plan.
So, basic to this image of the world is the notion, you see, that the world consists of stuff, basically. Primoridial matter, substance, stuff. As pots are made of clay.
And the potter imposes his will on it and makes it become whatever he wants. And so, in the Book of Genesis, the Lord God creates Adam out of the dust of the Earth. In other words, he makes a clay figurine, and then he breathes into it and it becomes alive.
Because the clay becomes informed. By itself it is formless; it has no intelligence, and therefore it requires an external intelligence and an external energy to bring it to life, and to put some sense into it. And so, in this way, we inherit a conception of ourselves as being artifacts, as being made, and it is perfectly natural in our culture for a child to ask its mother ‘How was I made?’ or ‘Who made me?’ And this is a very, very powerful idea, but for example, it is not shared by the Chinese, or by the Hindus.
A Chinese child would not ask its mother “How was I made?” A Chinese child might ask its mother “How did I grow?”—which is an entirely different procedure from making. You see, when you make something, you put it together; you arrange parts, or you work from the outside to the in, as a sculptor works on stone, or as a potter works on clay. But when you watch something growing, it works in exactly the opposite direction.
It works from the inside to the outside. It expands, it burgeons, it blossoms. And it happens all of itself at once.
In other words, the original simple form—say of a living cell in the womb—progressively complicates itself, and that’s the growing process, and it’s quite different from the making process. And so there is for that reason a fundamental difference between the made and the maker. And this image, this ceramic model of the universe, originated in cultures where the form of government was monarchical and where, therefore, the maker of the universe was conceived also at the same time in the image of the king of the universe: I’m quoting the Book of Common Prayer.
And so, all those people who are oriented to the universe in that way feel related to basic reality as a subject to a king. And so they are on very, very humble terms in relation to whatever it is that works all this thing. I find it odd—in the United States—that people who are citizens of a republic have a monarchical theory of the universe.
Because we are carrying over—from very ancient near-Eastern cultures—the notion that the lord of the universe must be respected in a certain way. Poeple kneel, people bow, people prostrate themselves. And you know what the reason for that is: that nobody is more frightened of everybody else than a tyrant.
He sits with his back to the wall, and his guards on either side of him, and he has you face downwards on the ground because you can’t use weapons that way. When you come into his presence, you don’t stand up and face him, because you might attack, and he has reason to fear that you might because he’s ruling you all. And the man who rules you all is the biggest crook in the bunch.
Because he’s the one who succeeded in crime. The other people are pushed aside because they—the criminals, the people we lock up in jail—are simply the people who didn’t make it. So naturally, the real boss sits with his back to the wall and his henchmen on either side of him.
And so when you design a church what does it look like? Catholic church, with the altar as it used to be—it’s changing now, because the Catholic religion is changing—but the Catholic church has the altar with its back to the wall at the east end of the church. And the altar is the throne, and the priest is the chief vizier of the court, and he is making abeyance to the throne in front; but there is the throne of God, the altar.
And all the people are facing it, and kneeling down. And a great Catholic cathederal is called a basilica, from the Greek basilis, which means ‘king.’ So a basilica is the house of a king, and the ritual of the Catholic church is based on the court rituals of Byzantium. A Protestant church is a little different, but basically the same.
The furniture of a Protestant church is based on a judicial courthouse. The pulpit—the judge in an American court wears a black robe, he wears exactly the same dress as a Protestant minister. And everybody sits in these boxes; like there’s a jury box, there’s a box for the judge, there’s a box for this, a box for that, and those are the pews in an ordinary kind of colonial-type Protestant church.
So both these kinds of churches—which have an autocratic view of the nature of the universe—decorate themselves, are architecturally constructed in accordance with politcal images of the universe. One is the king, and the other is the judge. Your honor.
There’s sense in this. When in court, you have to refer to the judge as ‘your honor.’ It stops the people engaged in litigation from losing their tempers and getting rude. There’s a certain sense to that.
But when you want to apply that image to the universe itself, to the very nature of life, it has limitations. For one thing, the idea of a difference between matter and spirit. This idea doesn’t work anymore.
Long, long ago, physicists stopped asking the question ‘What is matter?’ They began that way. They wanted to know, what is the fundamental substance of the world? And the more they asked that question, the more they realized the couldn’t answer it, because if you’re going to say what matter is, you’ve got to describe it in terms of behavior—that is to say, in terms of form, in terms of pattern.
You tell what it does, you describe the smallest shapes of it that you can see. Atoms, electrons, protons, mesons, all sorts of sub-nuclear particles. But you never, never arrive at the basic stuff.
Because there isn’t any. What happens is this: ‘stuff’ is a word for the world as it looks when our eyes are out of focus; fuzzy. Stuff—the idea of stuff is that it’s undifferentiated; some kind of a goo.
And when your eyes are not in sharp focus, everything looks fuzzy. When you get your eyes into focus, you see a form, you see a pattern. And so all that we can talk about is patterns.
So the picture of the world in the most sophisticated physics of today is not formed stuff—potted clay—but pattern. A self-moving, self-designing pattern; a dance. And we haven’t yet—our common sense as individuals hasn’t yet caught up with this.
Well now, in the course of time—in the evolution of Western thought—the ceramic image of the world ran into trouble. And changed into what I call the fully automatic model, or image, of the world. In other words, Western science was based on the idea that there are laws of nature, and it got that idea from Judaism and Christianity and Islam.
That, in other words, the potter—the maker of the world in the beginning of things—laid down the laws and the law of God, which is also the law of nature. It’s called the logos. And in Christianity, the logos is the second person of the trinity, incarnate as Jesus Christ, who thereby is the perfect exemplar of the divine law.
So we have tended to think of all natural phenomena as responding to laws as if, in other words, the laws of the world were like the rails on which a streetcar—or a tram, or a train—runs, and these things exist in a certain way, and all events respond to these laws. You know that limerick, So here’s this idea that there’s a kind of a plan, and everything responds and obeys that plan. Well, in the 18th century, Western intellectuals began to suspect this idea.
And what they suspected is whether there is a lawmaker; whether there is an architect of the universe. And they found out—or they reasoned—that you don’t have to suppose that there is. Why?
Because the hypothesis of God does not help us to make any predictions. In other words, let’s put it this way: if the business of science is to make predictions about what’s going to happen, science is essentially prophecy. What’s going to happen?
By studying the behavior of the past and describing it carefully, we can make predictions about what’s going to happen in the future. That’s really the whole of science. And to do this, and to make successful predictions, you do not need God as a hypothesis.
Because it makes no difference to anything. If you say ‘Everything is controlled by God, everything is governed by God,’ that doesn’t make any difference to your prediction of what’s going to happen. And so what they did was simply drop that hypothesis.
But they kept the hypothesis of law. Because if you can predict, if you can study the past and describe how things have behaved, and you’ve got some regularities in the behavior of the universe, you call that law. Although it may not be law in the ordinary sense of the word; it’s simply regularity.
And so what they did was: they got rid of the lawmaker and kept the law. And so they conceived the universe in terms of a mechanism. Something, in other words, that is functioning according to regular, clock-like, mechanical principles.
Newton’s whole image of the world is based on billiards. The atoms are billiard balls, and they bang each other around. And so your behavior—every individual—is therefore defined as a very, very complex arrangement of billiard balls being banged around by everything else.
And so behind the fully automatic model of the universe is the notion that reality itself is—to use the favorite term of 19th century scientists—blind energy. In, say, the metaphysics of Ernst Haeckel, and T.H. Huxley, the world is basically nothing but blind, unintelligent force.
And likewise, and parallel to this, in the philosophy of Freud, the basic psychological energy is libido, which is blind lust. And it is only a fluke, it is only as a result of pure chances that, resulting from the exuberance of this energy, there are people. With values, with reason, with languages, with cultures, and with love.
Just a fluke. Like, you know, 1,000 monkeys typing on 1,000 typewriters for a million years will eventually type the Encyclopædia Britannica. And of course the moment they stop typing the Encyclopædia Britannica, they will relapse into nonsense.
And so in order that that shall not happen, because you and I are flukes in this cosmos, and we like our way of life—we like being human—if we want to keep it, say these people, we’ve got to fight nature, because it’ll turn us back into nonsense the moment we let it. And so we’ve got to impose our will upon this world as if we were something completely alien to it; from outside. And so we get a culture based on the idea of the war between man and nature.
And we talk about the conquest of space. The conquest of Everest. And the great symbols of our culture are the rocket and the bulldozer.
The rocket—you know, compensation for the sexually inadequate male. So we’re going to conquer space. You know we’re in space already, way out.
If anybody cared to be sensitive and let what’s outside space come to you—you can, if your eyes are clear enough. Aided by telescopes, aided by radio astronomy, aided by all the kind of sensitive instruments we can devise. We’re as far out in space as we’re ever going to get.
But, you know, sensitivity isn’t the pitch. Especially in the WASP culture of the United States. We define manliness in terms of agression, you see, because we’re a little bit frightened as to whether we are really men.
And so we put on this great show of being a tough guy. It’s completely unneccesary. If you have what it takes, you don’t need to put on that show.
And you don’t need to beat nature into submission. Why be hostile to nature? Because after all, you are a symptom of nature.
You, as a human being, grow out of this physical universe in just exactly the same way that an apple grows off an apple tree. So let’s say the tree which grows apples is a tree which apples, using ‘apple’ as a verb. And a world in which human beings arrive is a world that peoples.
And so the existence of people is symptomatic of the kind of universe we live in. Just as spots on somebody’s skin is symptomatic of chicken pox. But we have been brought up by reason of our two great myths—the ceramic and the fully automatic—not to feel that we belong in the world.
So our popular speech reflects it. We say “I came into this world.” You didn’t—you came out of it. You say face facts.
We talk about encounters with reality, as if it was a head-on meeting of completely alien agencies. And the average person has the sensation that he is a somewhat that exists inside a bag of skin. The center of consciousness which looks out at this thing, and what the hell’s it going to do to me?
You see? “I recognize you, you kind of look like me, and I’ve seen myself in a mirror, and you look like you might be people.” So maybe you’re intelligent, and maybe you can love, too. Perhaps you’re all right; some of you are, anyway.
If you’ve got the right color of skin, or you have the right religion, or whatever it is, you’re OK. But there are all those people over in Asia, and Africa—and they may not really be people. When you want to destroy someone, you always define them as unpeople; not really human.
Monkeys, maybe. Idiots, maybe. Machines, maybe, but not people.
But we have this hostility to the external world because of the superstition—the myth, the absolutely unfounded theory—that you, yourself, exist only inside your skin. Now I want to propose another idea altogether. There are astronomers that say there was a primoridial explosion, an enormous bang millions of years ago—billions of years ago—which flung all the galaxies into space.
Well let’s take that just for the sake of argument and say that was the way it happened. It’s like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall. Smash!
And all that ink spreads; zzwshh! And in the middle it’s dense, isn’t it? And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets are finer and finer and make more complicated patterns, see?
So in the same way, there was a big bang at the beginning of things and it spread. And you and I, sitting here in this room as complicated human beings, are way, way out on the fringe of that bang. We are the complicated little patterns on the end of it.
Very interesting. But so we define ourselves as being only that. If you think that you are only inside your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated little curlique, way out on the edge of that explosion.
Way out in space, and way out in time. Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you’re a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, crrrck!, like this, and don’t feel that we’re still the big bang.
But you are. Depends how you define yourself. You are actually—if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning—you’re not something that is a result of the big bang, on the end of the process.
You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are. See, when I meet you, I see not just what you define yourself as—Mr.
so-and-so, Ms. so-and-so, Mrs. so-and-so—I see every one of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular way. I know I’m that, too. But we’ve learned to define ourselves as separate from it.
And so what I would call a kind of a basic problem we’ve got to go through first is to understand that there are no such things as things. That is to say separate things, or separate events. That that is only a way of talking.
If you can understand this, you’re going to have no further problems. I once asked a group of high school children “What do you mean by a thing?” And first of all, they gave me all sorts of synonyms. They said “It’s an object,” which is simply another word for a thing; it doesn’t tell you anything about what you mean by a thing.
Finally, a very smart girl from Italy, who was in the group, said a thing is a noun. And she was quite right. A noun isn’t a part of nature, it’s a part of speech.
There are no nouns in the physical world. There are no separate things in the physical world, either. The physical world is wiggly.
Clouds, mountains, trees, people are all wiggly. And only when human beings get working on things—they build buildings in straight lines, and try and make out that the world isn’t really wiggly. But here we—sitting in this room all built on straight lines, but each one of us is as wiggly as all get-out.