The Anonymous Guy Blog

This isn’t the whole thing. I just made this post to receive comments on the WTF number 2.

Well, this doesn’t belong to the WTF? area as it was a pleasant dream…

Well, it was about me and a bunch of other people, deciding where to live together. We struggled to find a place, but the place we found was simply perfect.

Near a mountainous town we found a place that was surrounded by small hills. The road leading to the house (it was more like a castle, judging by its size, style and decoration) was surrounded by a small lake. It almost seemed like the castle was built in a small island (To help understanding of that, imagine a volcano crater filled with water, with a small island in the middle and a road leading to the edge of the crater; the castle was built in the island). When we first went to that place, together, with the real state agent, we just said We’ll take it, not even knowing the price of the property. When the agent said You can have this place for just 15 million we were static. Some of us talked the agent into lowering the price to just 14 million (no idea of the currency) so we could also do some work on the property (It wasn’t entirely abandoned, but the road was poorly illuminated, some hydraulic work was needed as well). Everyone chipped in with a million each and we bought the property.

As soon as we closed the deal, reparations started. Some of us decided to go work on the garnening of the central yard, some of us decided to fix the broken lights and others, fixing the plumbing. We made a deal to not pick the rooms until everyone was happy about the place in general, then we would be able, as a group, to choose which room everyone wanted (It wasn’t a hard task, there were too many rooms to choose, all of them pretty much equal in size and decoration). Some of them wanted rooms on the eastern side of the castle, as they enjoyed the morning sun, while others, the opposite; I picked up a room to the south, mostly because it didn’t make much of a difference to me. I was happy, mostly because I would be living on my own, but also because of all that activity around the castle. It seemed alive with all those people working together for a single goal.

As soon as we were settled for good, we decided to go to the town to buy food (No one even thought about that; We didn’t even had a kitchen per se). I was pretty sure that food wouldn’t be necessary, as the lake was bountiful with fish, but during all that excitement, I didn’t even mention that. We all gathered in five cars and went to the town to do our shopping (The town was like 20 minutes driving down the road). As we were leavin, I glanced one last time through the rear-view mirror; our home, our own place to live without worries. I woke up then, but the feeling was still good…

So, today I took a day off work to get some rest, mostly because it’s damn hot around here this time of year and the humidity is also very low.

So, after lunch I decided to have some ice cream. Went to a shop, got a Haagen-Dazs pot (Macadamia Nut Brittle is the best ice cream ever) and came back home to do some chatting, listen to loud music and cool under the A/C.

Everything was fine up until the moment people from work started to call me and SMS me because the fax machine was broken and they had to send lots of faxes. That ruined my day as I wasn’t even supposed to be thinking about work today. But that got me on thinking about something else, related to work but also related to our lives in a society.

Why is work sometimes so aversive to us? Even tho I work in a place where I enjoy doing what I do, work itself is still aversive. I remember some parts of a book by Thorstein Veblen, entitled The Theory of the Leisure Class, where two distinct cultural processes were presented; technological processes and cerimonial processes (the translation of those terms might be wrong, specially because I didn’t read the english version of his book). The cerimonial processes are related to authority mandated by a person, while technological processes are related to authority mandated by the technology of a culture. The difference might be small, but it’s important when we observe that while technology avances through the time, one person that has authority, don’t need to advance. And that’s the reason why even today, we are still exposed to dogmatic rules stated by someone who might not even have a grasp on reality, but has the authority to put those rules, like in religion (I won’t discuss specific religions to avoid a flame war). The fact is that every single one of us should become little scientists and test their own theories about life, instead of just relying on the agenda of one person that might live in a situation different than yours.

Why I say that? One of the books that changed my life is Walden II, written by B.F. Skinner. That small utopic fiction is enough to make you want to pack your bags and move to a community like the one depicted in the book (There are some of them in the world, right now, just without the behavioral experiments in Skinner’s work, thus, without the strict technological processes described above), but it’s a tought thing to do, mainly because the cerimonial processes described by Veblen are so deep in our lives that we can’t even grasp on how life would be in a place that is entirely run by technological processes, as related by Sigrid Glenn, in an article entitled Metacontingencies in Walden Two. Behavioral Analysis and Social Action, published in 1986.

The point is that, given the circumstances and the society we live, problems like that are prone to occur.  However, should we give up our hopes to live in a place where you don’t have to deal with authority? A place where you do things because you want to do them, not because a superior yells at you and order you to do them?

I assume the answer to those questions is “NO”. We all would love to live in a place like that, where we like to do things because we want and we research actively everything related to our daily life in order to improve our knowledge, making the work less demanding and more fun. The absence of authority is also tempting, right?

In a later post I shall return on this topic and explain why absence of authority doens’t necessarily means lack of behavioral control; it’s just a different kind of control, a kind of control that is not imposed by a person, but by ourselves, living in harmony.

I finally learned how to use this thing. This is my first official post in here and I hope to add at least one post every week. If I disappear for a long time, it just happens.