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It took me 30+ years to realize what Alan Watts will tell you in 10 minutes...
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When I was uh quite young, I made a
solemn vow
which was that I would never accept a job.
job.
I would always be my own employer.
The essential principle of business of
occupation in the world is this.
Figure out some way in which you get
paid for playing.
And curiously there are very few roles
in life
which uh provide this possibility.
The successful artist, writer and
sometimes musician,
can occupy this role. I mean he may be a
but by and large almost everybody seems
to be compelled to take a job with a corporation.
corporation.
It's very difficult indeed these days to
run a small business where you're your
own boss because
because
you have to employ an enormous staff of
people to keep track of the paperwork.
I know a person for example who has a
farm where he raises avocados
and the department of commerce visited
him with a stack of forms this thick
which he had to fill in.
Well, he got tough and said, "I have the
faintest idea
what to fill into these forms." And he
said to the agent of the Department of
Commerce, "You fill them in." And he
made that man sit down and go through
the whole procedure of filling in these
forms cuz he said, "I don't have the
time. I'm raising avocados. That's my business."
business."
And as to all this paperwork, what to
hell with it.
And the same situation prevails not only
in business, but also in the university
and in the hospital.
One of my favorite doctors told me that
he spends only onethird of his working
hours practicing medicine. The rest is
in recording, accounting, filling in
reports. And it's the same in every
hospital. Paperwork endlessly because
the record of what you do is more
important than what you do.
And so for the same reason, a lot of
people don't believe they exist until
they see their activities reported in
A lot of juvenile delinquents commit
crimes just to get attention.
They'll get recorded. It's like you go
to a party, you know, it's a picnic on
the beach and it's great fun and
somebody says, "What a shame it is that
And remember that it takes as long to
view it or to listen to it as it does to
All organizations
are going by the book.
They are operating according to a manual
and in many corporations
uh individuals have constantly to
consult some sort of manual to know what
they should do instead of using their
own good sense.
This doesn't work.
It means that an organization is
entirely different from an organism.
You each one of you are an organism.
a very very complicated organism.
So in the same way
if a corporation is to be a true
organism as distinct from an organization
organization
it must be based on the principle of
and not on law.
Because if you can't trust other people,
you cannot have a community, not even a corporation.
corporation.
It's risky,
very risky to trust other people,
because they may let you down.
But on the whole, if you do trust them,
the chances are perhaps
that the system will work
simply because they are trusted.
And as soon as you've got a system
where, for example, in a supermarket,
there are mirrors all over the place, TV
cameras watching everything, all kinds
of checks on the cashiers that they
won't sneak off with something.
You've got a system that increasingly
won't work
because nobody will want to work there.
One of the major reasons for hippies and dropouts
dropouts
is that human beings don't want to work
under conditions like that
because they are mechanical conditions
and the mechanism
is quite distinct from the organism
because the mechanism is arranged on
linear plans the book whereas the
organism transcends that.
What do you really want?
I have proposed that there be an
entirely new kind of college entrance examination
examination
in which instead of answering a lot of
silly questions, you write for about 20
pages on your idea of paradise.
It can be any kind of paradise you want.
It can be very spiritual. It can be very
sensuous. But spell it out. What do you
Then you will hand this thesis in to an
assigned tutor on the faculty and he'll
read it over
and examine you closely as to whether
this is what you really want
and being very careful about what you
desire because there's a good saying be
careful of what you desire.
So this is the problem of thinking out carefully
carefully
where it is that you want to go. I as a
philosopher, mere philosopher,
always insist that I be paid for my work
and I get the highest fee I can get. And
people say, "Well, you're just out for money."
money."
because I give most of it away.
My own needs being extremely simple.
I don't even own a television set.
You know, it's a very simple life. But
I've got enough.
You see, a lot of people don't feel
happy unless they have another thing
beyond money, which is called status.
And status to a very large extent in our
economy consists in
conspicuous consumption
in having this thing and that thing and
the other thing in having a swimming
pool, a uh Ferrari, uh certain kind of
clothes and uh certain kind of house
with an enormous round style picture
window and so on and so on and so on.
And we think uh we need all that because
we've been persuaded by a certain kind
of propaganda
because we haven't asked ourselves
whether that was what we really wanted.
In other words, we've been propagandized
into thinking what we wanted. I remember
my daughter when she was in high school
insisted that she had to have a certain
number of Kashmir sweaters.
In those days, I couldn't afford them.
I said, "My dear, do you really want these
these or
or
is it just that you've been reading ads
in the magazine or listening to the
other children?" Because you see,
schools are places where you send your
child to be brought up by other children,
children,
but they all think they got to have
this, they got to have that.
And uh they don't really want it.
If they sat back and considered, do I
need all that? Is this trip really necessary?
necessary?
They would come to the conclusion that
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