very much to conversations where i'm very pleased to welcome to the program kirkpatrick sale and kirkpatrick there kirk sales the author of a book i want to show right at the outset so that we sure we don't forget to let you know what it looks like it's an incredibly important book and it's called rebels against the future and if we could come in tight focus on that let people know what the book looks like and it's a history if i may say so and modern commentary on the implications of the are you written this book you've written on many things maybe you could just give us a little thumbnail sketch of some of the things you've written on you wrote columbus you written on ecology you are and you are an ecologist when did you get the idea if you could of writing this particular book when did it come to you and maybe you could share a little bit of of the background with weaving it into some of your other writings that you've done yeah i've been doing work in a general sense trying to talk about the earth human place on earth how we're going on what we can do right now for one thousand five hundred and twenty years ago and i have to take different takes on it as as they come along i've done one book called human scale which suggests exactly how humans could shape their place of the earth and then i went on to study bio regionalism and what i kept coming up to campus was the obvious fact that western civilization is the problem is not the answer is the problem and that it is the attitudes that have been taught to us by western civilization that are preventing us from the right relationship to nature western civilization becoming increasingly the pattern of a global civilization as well yes thinker has another question yes but st is a western civilization that is shaped let us say at the beginning of the modern age about five hundred years ago when i attitude toward nature is one of exploitation one of greed one of conquest and so when i wrote about columbus what i was trying to bring out was the attitude that europe had toward the americas that wasn't one of sympathy to the people of nature or to nature itself though they found too fast current that sound full of nature and the people that leech or it was rather one of destruction and exploitation and we have continue that for five hundred years that attitude toward teacher gave me a great deal in our exploitation and in the purity between real sense but at the same time increasingly destroying it to destroy it systems and now in the  th century we realize that we are very close to eco side to the destruction of the earth itself yeah and that is a theme that is very very large seem to we all have to come to address i don't mean to be devil's advocate here  do you feel that the space odyssey two thousand and one which began with the early also looked at the scene or the early homo sapiens sapiens huddling in caves and being attacked by leopards and by taking up a spear against a leopard is a representation of that kind of a kind of exploitative attitude toward the environment around them by putting man's mark on the universe and by having to use the tools of the able to make them a bad status him you know a so that we can survive that seems fair enough species operate that way as the way that nature has planted and if we were to listen to how nature designed it we could live with limited numbers had limited impact exactly use the other species of the earth that is not a matter of the kind of exploitation that europe went on to perfect or that we have the th century inherit with that kind of exploitation on a massive scale worldwide scale  sweeps everywhere and sweeps everything in front of it and the reason i got onto the luddites was that you look at five hundred years of this do much more damage than ever before so is this like we did if i make or is this a a quantitative difference and what we had we had agriculture ten thousand years ago there's a qualitative difference that came with the let's say the renaissance or the five hundred years ago or the industrial revolution thanks originally to the steam engine it into other advances that has never been seen before the history of the world giving this particular civilization it is particular form more power more threatening power than any civilization has ever had and it is now worldwide of course we have we have now ratcheted that up again in the nd industrial revolution that we are now living through the computer age as i call it in the book ok you want to call that the nd industrial revolution rather than as some people say post industrial you make that point that we're still in an industrial world these are industries around they are they may not look like a steam factory industries but they are certainly industr and the men tulloch t of industrialism that began with the industrial revolution is still with us today and is still lies behind this nd industrial revolution believe now we have thanks to the computer a great deal more power speed efficiency to do all of the dangerous things that we do with them we have ever had before i wonder if you if we if we go back to that maybe we should go back you said the steam engine it was a major break  people who lived in cottages lived quite charming although fairly constricted lives in their cottages with family children community community with intimate ties of community and along comes a system which destroys all of that puts money up it a new way and makes the body in a new way that they hadn't had to do and forces them into factories where there are jobs at all and often there are no jobs and that people are forced into factories and the cottage industries are being destroyed and then lot of places that displays that labor input to the production with these new technologically oriented says  and there are also systems that can work every hour of every day and you begin to have a whole new idea of work and production that  not true in the centuries while cottage industries took hold among other things if i may end the conversation in a car marx a sociologist talked of work as being something that somebody gets a sense of identity from you put a good deal of yourself into it and so what a job might be something  comfortable lives and not and you know high level of material extravagance but fairly comfortable lives with a good deal of conviviality connected to it and a strong who decided that they would do so because about it and so it was an eight hundred and eleven dollars that they organized and had anonymous bands going out of the night with hammers smashing machines and burning the factories that were doing about of their jobs and we're bringing in this whole new system that was destroying their way of life in the evidently they failed but they failed because the british government came down on the side of the manufacturers there were a few reforms but essentially what it was is the site of the conquering of the attitude that people didn't nature are to be exploited for the benefit of interest free yes alas that has won and now we see today another step forward in that same process and yes there have been unions and yes there's been some government intervention and yes there's been some moderation here or there in that process but in general it is the onslaught of a mercantile industrial tallahassee that has pushed almost everything else aside and in the last twenty years of the computer age the new industrial revolution we have seen this in a st eighty and he had fifty thousand by the here forty thousand in they had eight hundred thousand before that but what's interesting is that in previous steps of the industrial revolution leading up to this one it was always said that you don't worry about it because there will be jobs in these new industries so that if you got kicked out of a job there was no more a job as a buggy whip makers you would find a job in the factories the car factories for effect and to some extent this did happen or what what happened in even greater way was that you got jobs making weapons in fact war was the solution more often than anything else but what's happening with this time around is that those industries that make this high tech stuff are laid off people yes they don't need people so there aren't any jobs if you markets to have their market because mr ruther would have said to mr ford you need pay five dollars a day in order to build your market you need a market in order for the mass produced goods to be sold but they now can maybe avoid that financial system that was able to send little blips on screens around the world and no longer did governments matter no longer in fact the gold matter what we were creating is a financial system that i almost independent of money yeah and that's what we have the information environment that's a more merging although it has more implications than that and it's got a new wrinkle as you say because we went from the agricultural worker to the industrial worker to the economic thinking of our historical patterns did not equipped us for a world in which the technology is literally able to misplace labor as an input to production and we still do not have any kind of a philosophy the deals with that question whether it's robert reich or newt gingrich or the things they're talking about within the congress of the united states or every one of the g seven countries do you think or do you worry is that a major point in your play right what is new is the fact that we down have machines that can do away with people at least the great majority of people that the machines can do the job or the machines consume those jobs overseas and still system knows what to do about it and that is to just simply go ahead with this and to layoff these people fit them into disposable jobs where you need them jobs where you don't have to pay big if it's very very low paid hard working jobs and when you don't need these people anymore you can fire and and so what is happening in our economy is that there is approximately twenty percent or so  of useful labor eighty percent of it down below is mostly junk and then all of that there's another twenty to thirty percent that is unemployed in effect that is to say although they may not be on the able to play the roles they either have temporary jobs occasional jobs aren't looking for jobs or no jobs at all now this is a distension of the society that it will not be able to withstand and i don't think for very much longer but that is certainly the answer that corporate america has decided to to this problem which is to say we don't care what happens we will use whatever we can to improve our bottom line for this quarter and that's all that matters and it's all that seems to matter to the market well that probably is anything that's probably all that has really mattered in the minds of the corporate leaders thing or to the degree that we had at some points a labor movement were it had real teeth that they had to answer to you know to the organized labor or response and that's been sorely some government regulation or into government did hardly matters at all so that's not a sufficient counterbalance governments in general simply do not have the wherewithal to save these people they don't have a safety net they can't  a safety net for these people because they don't have the money for it and then they don't have it in europe and they certainly don't have it here the way the pattern is of increasing corporate control with t any checks or reins upon it and that's what's happened thanks to the computer i would say in these last twenty five years you know i just i don't see if there's any i don't see that there's any  anyway there's that this is to be stopped and i cannot and i've looked at the range of remedies that people have put forth and they have been put forth let's make the corporations responsible that's control them let's pass this law i don't money for police presence and then we are industry and we are no the biggest gulag in the history of the world in this country yeah and we're getting bigger and you're right it is a growth of just one and a half one million know one out of every two hundred and fifty people you know if we want a system in which let us say that twenty percent continue to work and to make all economic decisions and then we employ let's say another ten or fifteen percent to be the jailers and the police for all the rest that's that's what we're headed to and i think we could kid ourselves that this is going to work for a while but i don't think that more than role in terms of the broader evolution of universal consciousness where man fits in with the nature of the arrogance of mankind ethno sent our anthropocentric views and other kinds of philosophical questions and so forth but i wonder if we can't go back just and we will get to that these are bigger larger questions you know that we want to or deal with more they are all the same color and there might be all the same and it might be that some of the answers in those philosophical musings might have the key to some what might be practical answer if there are practical answers and one al possibility is that there is no practical answer and some people have said that in the opera or misters design of universal mind it may be that we were meant to entropy in a certain sense as a species there's a book there's a film now twelve monkeys is out now that takes that kind of a theme in this kind but in any event but the idea of the of the of this is you and i are talking about the contemporary situation and that of the it's there you see a parallel between there's lessons and inspiration maybe a certain kind of room heightening attitude that the luddites had toward the whole enterprise of the industrial revolution not just one aspect of it or reforming it but revolutionize a revolutionary view toward the whole idea of realisation itself which seems to be willing to be accepted by the mass number of people or the great number of people that it is inevitable industrialization in the pattern that it is the way it's gobbling up human lives and that there's no questioning progress in a material way of industrial progress they took exception to that and also where did the term blue eyed come from and do we not want to get away from the idea that lewd ideas sometimes taken in some people's minds as a as a hopelessly  ludgate at any rate this was a mythical figure behind which they could operate they would send letters in their day or they would put on masks and go out and say i am king lo i do not demand that you remove these machines from your shop and i demand that you close down the factory and so on but you have to remember that they lost that they were rebels against a future that was coming at them with more power than they knew how to stop and so there is a sense in which it is true to say that all you're just being a lot i of has to be reexamined progress isn't simply something that seems to give us something better yet every day in fact progress is giving us a lot of bad things are a lot of problems a lot of evils and a lot of complexity that is having not only these economic effects the that we were speaking about but social psychological and environmental effects that are heading us i would say to ward a real catastrophe and social catastrophe and certain me ecological catastrophe if we continue the way we're going now that that is there for a future that we could legitimately rebel against whichever way we can be taking up sledgehammers may not be the way to do it now as the but i did back then but some equivalent of it may be a way to go at the very least we've got to start talking about it i got started pointing to the technology itself as the cause as the matter for debate as we face the future not simply say well technology's neutral it doesn't matter that's not what's the problem you know we have to point to the technology has to be in the saddle and riding our country in the direction that it's going and our will and our world and our and i world within a broader cosmic order and that sort of thing they for us or for disorder or it in that kind of thing and that question of just bringing a frontal assault upon the whole industrial revolutionary process itself deal that has been developed in a very sophisticated way particularly in this century to keep us from thinking about these problems there is of course all of the substances alcohol and others that keep us there is we have now with television managed to create a mass deadening machine that keeps us from thinking about things and that it has reached out into  we give you these material benefits around and then you will stop thinking or if you do start thinking will say well you can't have any effect on anything so you might as well go out and shop at the mall because that's all that's left and this this in this larger process of creating ways in which people do not think about the conditions that they live in is appalling and it's very difficult to to penetrate and i have found out that television and talking heads on television is not the way to penetrate the former for most of the time into working mindless working in to other ways so that the issue of technology has not come before the public for debate in these years when it has so obviously had an impact newsweek early last year had an article for a special issue called textual media and even the title of it says it which it said this is a new technology that is challenging our ability to cope that is changing our notions of reality that is shredding your clothes to show that it's changing our laws that is altering our mores speak at least for part of them please is to say that we as an american society got to start talking about technology and what it's doing to us and wake up from the illusion that it is just progress that we are progressing evolutionarily that there was a look at the same there then came home obvious that there is an echo there is an order and that there is a purpose to biological evolution itself on this rd planet in this solar system in this galaxy with the just told us of the new york times yesterday that there are six times the number of galaxies that we were previously aware of that there is a purpose to that biological any more or we believe in its existence only that they are to serve our him yes right then that is why we have developed all of these instruments to be able to exploit it with more speed and efficiency than ever before i system we had a system where it was not imbued because you're taking we're taking exception to that to the injustices that exist within the world if we had a system that was able to bring let's say not bring the inevitably bring justices but was unable to be inclusive of all the people of the world and not have the injustice of which are growing which is creating this crisis but you talk about in the modern you know comparing it to the little i revolutionary movement of the time but if you had a system where the technology was appropriately being are the justice was finding its way onto the world and a material standard of living was increasing and we had then a system that being called work would that be something that we're trying to do more this many people at any level we certainly cannot sustain it at a higher level of material progress that simply means using up the earth's resources had an even faster way w th something like four percent of the world's population north america uses on the order of thirty five to forty percent of its of the world's resource every year obviously if other people seek this same level of material achievement another four percent will be able to do so maybe another ten percent and then we are using up all of the world's resources for this this tiny fragment of less than a th of the world's people well obviously that would that is not possible to achieve yeah  we are prepared to see the death of those four billion people while two billion are able to take over all the world's resources and then those two billion people discover that without those other species we cannot survive and so so yeah it is a it's a foolish dream to think that there are material levels to which we can rise and yet he must in fact the other direction yet court that's easy for you and i to say live in the western society and have the benefits of a you know i fairly advanced living standard that we're enjoying now and for us to say that those of the rest of the world who  seem almost universally to aspire and inspire almost magically now china other places to elemental what would seem to us elemental material standards of television set of the sea i would like to have the mobility of transportation it seems to be that that is something that they are aspiring very strongly through and is it right for us they say we have this but it's not right for you to be able to have we can't consider any way in which those who have not had the material benefits that we maybe are languidly saying we we have this stuff you know or not the rest of the world cannot acquire it without the destruction of the world there is there aren't enough resources out there for the rest of the world to acquire the if if all of china was to have one car this would use up the resources of the world and it would produce pollution beyond sustainability so  is it is not possible for the world to me to imagine higher levels of material prosperity that is in fact the problem and therefore once you wonder stay about what what you work toward is for our society which is the the dangerous society because we are using up these resources so quickly our society to retrench had to retrench by getting back into a conception of nature in which we live to go beyond that because at the population of six billion the human species one species is too large to be able to settle in the earth it is killing off other species at the rate of something like two or watershed an island or something where you see yourself into the connected with nature this is not a bad thing yourself as part of the world because that is a concept too broad to have any meaning to anybody's daily life really into boy if  you see yourself in the immediate surroundings and understand that what you do has an effect on all these other species and the systems that you were and they depend upon then you will begin to understand carrying and what the limits of the human population must be in that area and work toward achieving those limits yeah you might be able to not only understand those two things one thing is to understand intellectually another thing is to feel it i mean the lessons we might have learned from the aboriginal peoples of nor of north and south america who are in a closer touch with tribal aboriginal peoples around the world they have things to teach us in terms of the feeling and the attitude they have toward the broader world around them and i don't want to go on endlessly being devil's advocate and bring all kinds of problems are buckminster fuller used to talk about about ephemeral as ation of being able to do more with less that communications satellite put took could it communicate as much as one hundred and seventy thousand tons of copper cable he tried to move against mall and tried to say small things could be dis you know just could be argued against or over the silicon revolution for that matter in itself but being able to do more with less being able to do to be able to have more production with less raping of the environment let's say we get to fusion we get to a system of energy that is not going no no no  idea about material better if you bring it down to work my children survive and if you can bring it down to where you're going to say to a mother in a rd world country you have to choose that three of your children are not going to survive and bring it down to ourselves in our systems at our comedy from the rest of the world they will be much healthier without us they will not be able to have our televisions and our cars but that is much better for that society than their having them or attempting to have them they will be able to develop on their own without the industrial system to which they are now in slave at the same time we retrench to our own bio regions and make our economies fit into the resources of that by region rather than stealing them from around the world as we now do and you begin to see that this is a process of retrenchment that is beneficial not only for the people overseas who are finally free to do what they need want to do beneficial for us because we are brought back to the reality of the nature the way in which we can see a rational future in which we have the industrial world leave the rest of the world alone stop exploiting it stop with the ideas that that stuff is out there in their country for us to be able to have and so on well we'll give them televisions and cars and return a place to stop everything was it seemed to want it because they seem to want to you know they seem to want to brought in they have destroyed traditional values and made traditional values look ridiculous to school children to to grown ups and they have replaced them with these dying bubbles of the industrial age radio and they are they're absolutely destructive and a settle society that once depended upon singing around the fireplace or when eddie communal chore was being  human species at which we were no longer destroying the world but contributing to the world and helping with the texture of the rich texture of nature i think that population would be quite small what do you think it would be what if there was a point there was a review in the new york times this weekend understand and this is what a a by a regional this is what a sense of our intimacy with nature would teach us that all of the other species are equally full of the right the need to blossom on the earth you know we have no right to prevent them from doing that if we understand that we get to a population which is probably on the order of a one billion i would suggest  idea that that that idea of giving getting to that to that bad pattern of population and that pattern what is it what is it to do it the source of the green the source of the material greed the source of the wanting the reaching the the the the exploitation is that come from an essentially in secure inner core of who you think i actually read what i think you can and what overcomes that what would make it possible for people to feel a sense of  of enough i have enough i have enough of the security of feeling a sense of internal security to where they wouldn't have to feel as though they have to exploit these environment and sadly the people that you spoke of before modulating well organized each cell is in sync with every other cell in there it's not run away if you have a runaway cell in there that's a cancer as we have if you take that in terms of the broader evolution of consciousness on the planet our biological process in the way in d n a is a metaphor in a certain sense isn't it for organization of a of an organism or and can we read that a lodger or could we get over to the work of rupert sheldrake and some of the things that he sees us in a broader cosmic pattern and is there any inspiration for this possibility of our developing an alternative paradigm for the planet you know the the i understand he has to be clear that this process of greed  the societies but it is not inherent in tribal societies and in fact all of the rituals practices would discourage any concept like that it would take ideas of individual  as we look at it from a western perspective in europe in the th and th centuries at a time when nothing else pertains at a time when the church is corrupt and useless and a in europe in those conditions it is not reasonable for a society generally to turn to individuals of the theory of as it were in other words to say i am going to survive and the value that i will have in my life is more gold more things and the better i am the more of these i acquire the more these i quire the better i think i think that the the attitudes of materialism and individual is upon which capitalism is the dominant species and that all other species are are inferior and can be used by the human to amass these material which is moving around a lot of women around a couple one hundred thousand years and most of that time we were probably pr proves so successful a way for a few people to get very wealthy that this and then we have the two american continents to exploit that a number of people get very wealthy that this pattern becomes established  did not believe that those were that material things were the answer to our problems and he saw in our fellow humans and in our relationship to the earth and to the ho precious species of the earth the connections that we want to make well that is indeed a larger and more important connection in terms of particular if we go to we didn't get a chance to talk about lovelock and gaia as the same thing and sees an organic form for the universe itself you know ended gives us some purpose and we're able to get to that and we have been able to get to some of the other implications of the of the of the of the development of the of the the modern experience but we're in a difficult sledgehammer or its equivalent i don't think that's going to be enough now it wasn't enough for the luddites but it might awaken us now these questions that i say have to be on the table we have to be discussing these issues of technology i my in my pressure people to go into a room and really discuss these things rather than just gloss it over and not get down to the really important core issues philosophically and i want to listen to a television program that actually think about it after christmas or if i may get yourself in a quiet bathtub somewhere or a blanket someplace and read a really good book called it which we've been talking about rebels against the future and it's the mood i it's and their war on the industrial revolution written  lessons for the computer age into the ninety's written by the author or our guest here i could patrick salem kirk thank you really very very much for coming into this program for coming a man had a network and for all your very important work over the years i thank you very much for that we hard conversations like you were coming back again next week is what you do to me and that's it for this segment kirk once again thank you very much for everything until next time i play