Alan Watts and Basic Income
By: Alex Wray Jordan
Tags: Basic Income, Alan Watts, Money Management, Philosophy, Happiness

Alan Watts and Basic Income

Photo by Jordan Whitfield on Unsplash

The Problem With Productivity

What happens when we can produce goods cheaply using automation and a minimum of human labor? How do people who lost their jobs to robots survive? More importantly, (to the automated manufacturers) how do people pay for the goods that are being produced?

Alan Watts: Money = Information

Alan Watts, a British philosopher who brought eastern philosophy to the open minds of the west coast in the 1960s asked and answered the questions listed above in his lecture, On Money, Guilt and the End. His quiet and calm thoughts regarding basic income continue to be debated with great emotions today. Watts begins by noting that money isn’t real.

“…money is nothing but bookkeeping. It is figures. It is a way of measuring what you owe the community and what the community owes you.”

Watts states that the first thing to realize is that money is simply information. This information is controlled by our attitudes, beliefs, and superstitions that inhibit the free flow for productive use. Watts discussed the disconnection between the emotional blocks we have with money and its ability to produce technology that can help humans.

“…our psychological attitude to money 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.”

The Value of Money

Watts cites economist Robert Theobald.

“…the proposition that he puts forward is very simple: that money is a circulation of information and in itself has no value… We must recognize, then, that money is a pure abstraction.”

Watts goes on to describes money as only an accounting of available economic energy.”

Money/Technology and the Protestant Work Ethic

In the 1960s it was becoming evident that technology would continue to move forward to increase productivity with less or no human labor. People will lose jobs or move into what Watts called “nonsense employment and busy work — bureaucratic and otherwise.”

Instead of a dystopia of machines replacing humans Watts wanted a world in which machines would allow humans to rise above menial labor. But first, we have to deal with the concept of the Protestant Work Ethic.

“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.”

Basic Income?

What happens when the unemployed and the underemployed labor force is unable to purchase the products of an automated manufacturer? Watts gives the following answer:

“…the public has to be provided with the means of purchasing what the machines produce. People say, “That’s not fair! Where’s the money going to come from? Who’s gonna pay for it?” The answer is: the machine. The machine pays for it. Because the machine works for the manufacturer and for the community.”

Alan Watts again cites economist Robert Theobald in the discussion of minimum income.

“Theobald points out that every individual should be assured of a minimum income. Now, you see, that absolutely horrifies most people. “Say all these wastrels, these people who are out of a job because they’re really lazy.” See? “Giving them money?” Yeah. Because otherwise, the machines can’t work. They come to a blockage.”

Job vs. Vocation

According to Watts, the basic problem is guilt. The need to work to earn a living. Watts describes the conflict as the difference between having a job and having a vocation.

“So this goes very deep into us. It goes deep, deep, deep into a problem we have about guilt. I wonder often if there’s any relationship between guilt and gold; that the love of money is the root of evil. It’s a very true saying…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 sole purpose of making money.”

Money Becomes the Goal

“But 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.”

Guilt About Money Changes Nothing

Alan Watts explains that by simply feeling guilty we do absolutely nothing to improve a situation.

“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 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.”

Good Requires Evil

Even if somehow we found a way to reconcile our feelings of guilt, greed, and fear about money for the betterment of all would we solve the world's problems? Watts did not believe that we can have good without the balance of evil.

“So, in other words, you might say that the function of the devil is to be always losing the battle, but never finally lost. And the function of the good side is to be always winning the battle, but never to be the victor. And by this means the pot is kept boiling, interest is kept up, and everything is kept moving. So that, of course, if we solve certain economic problems, for example, and we have a world where people are not committed to drudgery, we shall discover social evil in some new form.”

Money Does Not Equal Happiness

We all know that money does not make you happy. However would having sufficient food, shelter and comfort bring happiness? Probably not. Humans will always have something waiting in the wings to cause concern.

“And so we may be assured that when the human race goes to full economic prosperity and there is nothing further to be worried about in the way of housing and clothing and food, that we shall instead worry quite fervently about something else. Because, you see, we are always really in the same place. This is the basic understanding of relativity.”

In Summary:

Money is an accounting tool, information, a measure of available economic energy.

Automated manufacturing results in higher unemployment and underemployment rates.

Our attitudes about money, guilt, the Protestant Work Ethic are roadblocks to Basic Income.

If the roadblocks were removed would more money make people happier?

Alan Watts

Alan Watts died in 1973 leaving the world to continue to try to find its own way. He was in many ways ahead of his time living and teaching in Berkley California, ground zero for the counter-culture movement that he helped define.

Luckily for us, his lectures and broadcasts have been immortalized digitally for the betterment of humans. I have humbly taken his quotes from one such lecture to illustrate how there is really nothing new under the sun.

To access this lecture please go to https://www.organism.earth/library/document/money-guilt-end