«Center for the Development of Social Relationships,
LLC»
We
have complete confidence that modern society has an enormous potential for
development. We also believe that current conditions prevent our potential from
being fully developed and cause challenges such as unemployment, the high cost
of housing, the growing gulf between rich and poor, constantly increasing
levels of stress, economic instability, and inefficiency of scientific and
technological progress. The project we have in mind is at the preliminary stage.
Our small group has analyzed existing problems and set forth some initial steps
toward solutions.
Here
is our analysis of two problems that impede social progress.
1. The first problem is the existence of luxury products and
luxury features.
·
Civilization
spends a significant amount of its vital resources on the creation of luxury
articles. However, since luxury articles do not by themselves have any socially
useful functions, these expenditures are completely useless for society, and
significant vital resources are wasted.
·
Most
people find luxury articles alluring because such products embody success and
define an individual’s social importance. When many people strive after luxury,
they create a demand that diverts resources from those who are actually
contributing to social well-being.
2. The second problem is people’s lack of social protection.
·
At
present each person is left to fend for him or herself. The higher a person’s
income, the greater the degree to which he or she is physically protected. The
lower one’s income, the more vulnerable one becomes, (Status and Stress (By MOISES
VELASQUEZ-MANOFF) The Status Syndrome: How Social Standing Affects Our Health
and Longevity by Michael Marmot, M. G. Marmot) sometimes
to the point of risking physical death. This fact forces people to become
brutal and grab whatever they can grab; it spawns greed and sometimes leads to a
form of insanity in which the accumulation of money becomes a goal in and of
itself, driving people to uncontrolled and endless money-grubbing. It is precisely the risk of physical
vulnerability and physical death (remote but nonetheless real) that is the root
cause of such vices as greed and can lead to the insanity of uncontrolled
money-grubbing.
·
The lack of real physical support from society is a main factor in
the formation of phenomena such as stress.
·
Stress has a negative effect on labor productivity.
·
Stress is responsible for most cases of suicide, cardiovascular
disease, premature death, etc.
To get a better picture of the problem, it is
helpful to watch a few documentaries on luxury. Then, reflect on the
irrationality of spending our vital resources this way.
Take a look at how our labor and materials
are put to use…
Goods that are obviously extravagant and
opulent are only the most visible part of the tribute being paid to luxury by
our civilization. Significantly greater expenditures of labor go to the
insertion of luxury features (in varying proportions) into at least one half of
ordinary consumer goods produced for consumption by people of average means.
A list of luxury goods, provided by the authors
of a Wikipedia article on luxury - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxury_vehicle, includes more than
one hundred automobile brands. We can add to that list many other cars that
include luxury features to a lesser degree, and imagine the amount of labor and
materials spent producing them.
Look at the series of documentary films
Planet Luxury
Look at the enormous amount of labor poured
into the creation of Bentley automobiles.
The life of luxury may seem attractive to
some, but we believe that our ideas of beauty have been formed on the basis of
values tacitly agreed upon, in which luxury plays a very significant role in a
person’s life.
PROJECT: The creation of conditions to optimize economic
progress
We
don’t aim to improve market principles, but rather to create conditions most
favoring the functioning of the free market and the more efficient development
of society as a whole.
The
project’s goals are:
1. Creating conditions under which the
ownership of luxury goods will no longer bring benefits; and then directing the
resources freed up from the production of luxury goods toward the development
of socially useful projects and scientific and technological progress.
2. Freeing up people’s time, so they have
three or four days per week free.
3. Significantly decreasing stress due to increased
social protection.
4. Creating working conditions that make a
choice of profession or change of profession much easier. This in turn will
facilitate a decrease in stress, along with an increase in the productivity and
quality of work.
5. Creating conditions most favorable to the
development of inventiveness, creativity, scientific research, and education.
6. Creating conditions under which crime,
racial intolerance, ethnic intolerance will be naturally eliminated from
society.
PART
ONE
LUXURY
In
this project, we explain the essence of the problem. The project does not include any plans for directly hindering the
production of luxury goods.
The
project will only engage in the formation of conditions under which luxury will
lose its allure in people’s minds, after which the production of luxury goods will
experience a correction due to market forces alone.
To emphasize again, this project does
not include any plans for banning luxury articles. The goal of the project is
to create conditions under which luxury will naturally lose its significance in
people’s consciousness and gradually disappear as a phenomenon.
First let’s take a
look at the word “luxury.”
The
dictionary defines “luxury” as something not essential but conducive to
pleasure and comfort; something expensive or hard to obtain; sumptuous living
or surroundings. Another way to define a luxury good is one that is expensive
but non-essential. Luxury can also be defined as excess in comfort and
pleasures, connected to the squandering of wealth.
But
we propose to expand the meaning of the word. Luxury should be defined as objects
or services not essential to human beings, including those which include
superfluous functions and superfluous design features whose purpose is not to raise quality but to raise prices with the
goal of limiting access, thus transforming them (partially or completely)
into symbols of wealth
(Let’s not
confuse luxury with comfort, because within reasonable limits, comfort is an
essential need. Only excesses in comfort should be classified as luxury.)
Luxury
goods include absolutely all jewelry made of precious metals and gems;
automobiles whose prices exceed a reasonable maximum; dwellings whose size exceeds
a reasonable number of square feet; furniture manufactured from expensive woods
or with superfluous design features; fashionable clothing in which the price
reflects the designer’s name, the producer’s brand, etc.
Luxury
goods are so popular that to one degree or another, luxury features are present
in a broad spectrum of the most varied goods. In other words, an enormous
number of goods and services include some non-functional addition whose main
purpose is to bring a higher price.
For
example, the price of an ordinary assembly-line electric water kettle for
making tea can vary from about 15 dollars to about 600 dollars. But the
functionality and the quality of the materials used are basically not much
different. Close examination leads to the conclusion that price increases can
be justified up to about 50-80 dollars. From the practical point of view, further
increases in the kettle’s price have diminishing significance and pursue one
goal only – that of artificially limiting access to the item through the use of
more costly materials, unnecessary expenditures of labor and unnecessary design
features.
I can
foresee objections along the following lines – there is no such thing as
superfluous design, and a beautiful design sometimes costs a great deal of
money. I disagree, first of all because beauty in design is a relative concept.
In the final analysis, design is beautiful or attractive when it has a definite
practical purpose, inseparably connected with generally accepted values. If a
luxury good incorporating precious metals and gems seems in the eyes of the
ordinary person to have some vitally important value, then that is because those
precious metals and gems enter into our mind’s concept of beauty to a
significant degree. A 600-dollar tea kettle, glittering with genuine gold leaf
and sporting a handle that has been twisted into fanciful shapes and carved
with colorful patterns, will look beautiful to us. But if the significance and
value of the precious metals and gemstones incorporated by that $600 tea kettle
were to suddenly disappear, would we see it as so beautiful?
A
logical question arises. Why, then, do people “need” luxury (or luxury features),
if they are not physically necessary for human life? What makes luxury so
alluring?
The
fact is that luxury fulfills a most important function in a person’s life. By
giving a visual demonstration of a person’s level of success and his or her
social status, luxury defines a person’s significance in society. In other
words, luxury is a symbol that gives
visual proof of its owner’s social importance.
The
determination of a person’s social importance is extraordinarily important for
every single person. Money acts as a marker of importance. The higher the
amount of money earned by a person, the higher his or her social status. But a
person’s earnings cannot be directly seen by other people. For that reason, a person feels obliged to
give visual form to part of his or her money by transforming it into luxury
goods and good with luxury features, thus demonstrating his value and
importance. Luxury and luxury features have penetrated all the goods surrounding
us, at all social levels. Luxury requires colossal investments of our labor and
materials, but its sole purpose is to demonstrate its owners’ social significance!
Colossal human resources are engaged in
the production of uninspired symbols.
It
is probably not necessary to explain how much it matters to people to be able
to demonstrate their social importance and position in society.
Indeed, it
is a vital need. A person’s social significance is a basic part of the
evolutionary mechanism which forms and improves human beings.
Social
importance has always played a crucial role in the selection of a mate and in
the formation of business and social ties; and luxuries (or luxury features)
have always been the sole visual
expression of a person’s “quality.”
The link
between luxury and success is so deeply rooted in our consciousness that at
times, people can derive psychological satisfaction from an article of luxury
even when they own it in private, with no ability to flaunt it for everyone to
see. This of course nullifies the sole value the article luxury had – that of
visually demonstrating its owner’s importance.
But the problem is
not in the fact that people need to define their personal worth, but in the
fact that this is being done in such a wasteful manner.
Giving
visual form to a person’s importance is currently only possible through the
transformation of part of his or her savings into symbols that are expensive,
very labor-intensive, and completely useless for society.
This is where the
heart of the problem lies.
So,
is the creation of mere symbols worth all the expenditure of labor and
materials that go into them?
Consider
ancient Egypt. (See Dr. Richard Redding’s Pyramids and Protein.)
Egypt
destroyed itself by squandering resources on the creation of stone pyramids. Over
the course of centuries, millions of people and millions of tons of food were
sacrificed to stone symbols of prosperity, which slowly starved and eventually
killed a once-mighty civilization.
Yes,
common sense tells us that spending on luxury is absurd and destructive to
society.
For
example, let’s look at some examples of spending by Great Britain. The government
of that country appropriates about 500 million dollars a year for cancer research.
In the same country, private persons invest their money in soccer clubs. The
price of one such club can exceed 500 million dollars… Are these two uses of 500
million dollars of equal merit? Which type of investment has greater value for
humanity and for the investors themselves?
The benefits
to society from scientific research into the causes and cures of cancer can be
understood by everyone, but what benefits flow to society from the purchase of
a soccer club? It doesn’t take much effort to understand that such an
investment does not benefit society in any way. There is no benefit to the
sports world, the game of soccer, or even to the specific club changing hands,
which can earn money for its development on its own. The only benefit from such
an investment can be to the actual purchaser, who obtains a potential (not
guaranteed) profit from resale. But if the purchaser of the club or one of his
relatives suddenly comes down with a disease, say leukemia, for which there is
no cure, then the erroneous nature of such a foolish investment may become
apparent, even to the purchaser. Nevertheless, soccer clubs are bought and
sold… Why? The fact is that along with the potential for making more money, the
owner acquires a status symbol, showing his extremely high social status. Ownership
of a soccer club is the ownership of famous group of athletes. In a certain
sense, it is the ownership of other human beings, and there are only a few
people in this world who can afford such a luxury – only the elite. In this
sense, the soccer club should be viewed as a luxury good.
Here is
another example – the Bentley automobile. The prices run from $150,000 to $4,500,000.
To what degree are such prices (and the corresponding expenditures of labor and
materials that are used in producing these cars) justified, when comparison is
made with such workaday vehicles as the Toyota Corolla or the Prius, which
basically are the equal of the Bentley in terms of quality and comfort, but are
several orders cheaper, costing from $12,000 to $25,000? Common sense suggests
that in such automobiles, the lion’s share of the labor and materials has been
converted into frivolous luxury, into a mere symbol to provide visual
demonstration of its owner’s status. Just think for a minute: the labor of a
million people and tons of materials are engaged in the production of expensive
cars, not to mention the army of people indirectly connected to the business,
such as doctors, insurance companies, teachers, children’s agencies,
transportation, restaurants, and so forth. All of these efforts ultimately join
together to produce as their end product a mere symbol. Not medicine, not things
for every day use, not electronics, not food.
Expensive
automobiles are merely the tip of the iceberg. Luxury features have penetrated
our entire world, entering into different goods in one degree or another. Luxury
and prestige cost humanity billions of hours of our labor and our lives, trillions
of tons of the most valuable resources. All of that, just to carry out a simple
function, that of demonstrating a person’s social importance…
Is
it possible to do away with luxury? We believe that it is possible. But first,
it is necessary to find an alternative
to take its place – a cheaper way for a person to provide visual demonstration
of his or her importance.
In
the digital age, the best alternative to cumbersome and expensive trinkets (i.e.
luxury goods) may be a computer-generated number assigned to a person. This
number can become a symbol – capable of replacing all the luxury goods that
people now feel obliged to produce, purchase, fill up their space with, and
even literally carry on their backs. The creation of such computer programs is
possible. Something analogous already exists – the computerized systems used by
banks and lenders to determine a person’s creditworthiness. The creation of a
similar system to measure social importance is undoubtedly a complicated
assignment, but entirely feasible.
A
great deal of varied information could go into the determination of this
number: the amount of money earned, the level of education, work experience,
the number of inventions and innovations, scientific papers, etc. This will
make it possible to give a more precise assessment of a person and facilitate
the development of qualities useful for society as a whole.
A
high number will confer all sorts of advantages on its owner: access to an
assortment of different tools (from simple tools and workshops up through
research laboratories, institutes, factories and plants, publishers, etc.,
depending on a person’s education, experience, etc.), certain rights and
privileges, as well as respect, prestige, and the corresponding sexual
attractiveness.
In
the electronic age, would not be difficult to make a person’s number visible
and conspicuous to everyone nearby.
An important note:
The new value system does not include any coercion. Each person will decide on
his own whether he would rather strive to obtain luxury or instead receive an
electronically-generated number that could open the gates to new opportunities.
We
understand that for many people, such a change in values may seem fantastic,
unfeasible, and unworkable. That is understandable. Luxury has been part of our
mentality since childhood, as a natural, unshakable, and inalienable part of
the world around us. For millennia, indeed for all of human history, luxury has
been craved; it has been inseparably tied to success, power, physical
protection, and sexual attractiveness. But the permanent attraction of luxury
is illusory and relies only on our lack of vision.
As
soon as some society or group of people accepts a set of new social rules in
which luxury has no place, their worldview instantly changes. Their thinking adapts
to the new rules, and things previously implausible turn out to be obvious and
natural.
Human
nature is extremely flexible. Think of how easily and how quickly children
accept the rules of any new game. Or how quickly and naturally people’s
thinking adapts to any new conditions, no matter how unlikely. Our rapid
adaptability to the environment has been polished for millions of years and is
one of the most important qualities that determine our ability to survive to a
significant degree.
If
there are tangible material and psychological advantages associated with the
new values, advantages that improve competitiveness and thus the ability of
people to survive, then the new values will rapidly crowd out the old values,
automatically modifying our worldviews.
Imagine
a world in which the social importance and value of a person are determined extremely
simply and cheaply, without the intermediary of high-priced luxury goods. Luxury
in such a world will inevitably disappear, freeing up significant resources to
be used to intensify of scientific and technological progress and improve
people’s lives.
IMPORTANT
NOTE
Nothing
– explanations, education, obstacles in the form of taxes on luxury goods or
additional progressive taxes, coercive means – will ever be able to force
people to renounce luxury and endless hoarding, for such methods would merely
set up barriers, without changing the
tacitly accepted rules of the game which have controlled our world for
millennia. Without changing the essence of the
value and thus people’s objectives, it would be senseless to call upon people
to be reasonable, as people would attempt to simply overcome the new obstacles.
Even those who understand the existing problem are obliged at present to bow to
the generally-accepted rules of the game. In this case, a luxury for the
people, on the contrary, will become even more attractive.
For
this reason, people will always search out legal or even illegal means of concealing
their incomes: opening off-shore accounts, transferring savings into countries
with lower taxes, changing citizenship, acquisition of luxury goods in the
names of relatives, etc. In this case, a luxury for the people, on the
contrary, will become even more attractive.
To solve the problem
requires fundamental changes in people’s worldview. Once we change people’s
interests, there will be no need for a progressive tax, luxury tax, or appeals
to reason and magnanimity.
PART
TWO
SOCIAL
PROTECTION
The
lack of decent social protection is the basis of such social vices and problems
as greed, aggression, stress, and crime.
The
existing social programs of the modern world are not able to solve these problems
because they are oriented toward helping people on the verge of a physical
catastrophe. Assistance programs – government medical insurance for people with
low incomes, unemployment benefits for those who have lost their jobs,
financial payments to the disabled, and so forth – are all well and good, but can
in no way protect the majority of the population from stress, greed, aggression
and crime.
An important
clarification: This project does not promote
any communist utopias. We are talking about formation of a social structure
which provides more favorable conditions for people to live and work.
To
start with let’s ask the following question. What is the most costly and vital necessity
for a modern person’s physical life in this world? We think that the answer is
obvious for any person: decent housing. The risk of losing one’s home is the
most stress-inducing factor for the average person. It is also the budget item that
consumes the most money.
Hence, the
fundamental factor in the program of physical protection for people should be
taken as the creation of high-quality, but affordable housing.
PART
THREE
CONCLUSION
In summary, this
project seeks to solve two problems: getting rid of luxury and creating genuine
physical protection for people.
This
is what the project looks like.
1. Developing special housing that combines
minimal expenses with the maximum possible – but objectively reasonable – level
of comfort and quality of construction. Here we should stress that we are not talking about cheap housing, but
housing combining the optimum amount of comfort and quality and the least
possible cost – what we might call “optimal housing.”
2. Developing a special program that would
make it possible to rid ourselves, in a natural
way (i.e. without the use of coercive force), of luxury as a phenomenon and
using the freed-up resources to intensify scientific and technological progress
and elevate the well-being of society.
The current task of
the project is to create and develop a web site to allow further and deeper
development of our theories and to begin the implementation of a technical plan
for the practical realization of the project.
PART
FOUR
THE
STAGES OF REALIZATION OF THE PROJECT
- The creation of
and development of a web site whose purpose will be:
- Forming an
organization of like-minded people.
- Improving the
theoretical basis of the project through discussion of all its aspects on
internal forums, and through the enlistment of professionals in various
fields: sociologists, economists, mathematicians, technologists.
- The formulation and
publication of the basic principles of the project’s theoretical component.
- The creation of
a technical plan for the practical realization of the project, i.e. a
business plan.
- The creation of
a foundation which would accept contributions.
- The practical
realization of the project:
- The construction
of an experimental community, including industrial buildings to ensure
jobs for the residents. This community would offer its residents certain
programs, which would be selected on a voluntary basis.
- The development
and implementation of a system offering an alternative to luxury.
- The development
and implementation of a special banking program aimed at creating
efficient economic mechanisms to assure the maximum protection of
residents from the loss of their housing.
- The development
and implementation of special programs making it possible to efficiently
raise the skills of any professional, and also create the optimal
conditions for the real possibility of easily (with minimal expense)
changing profession.
IN
CONCLUSION:
WHAT
ARE THE ADVANTAGES OF A NEW TYPE OF SOCIETY?
1.
Civilization
will free up considerable resources previously used to produce luxury goods as
status symbols.
2.
Instead
of the uncontrolled and endless hoarding of money which ends up being turned
into symbols of wealth and success, people will have other priorities:
inventiveness, science, technology, art, culture, and education.
3.
Resources
not used for luxury will be used for scientific and technological progress.
This will automatically elevate the well-being of all humanity and the standard
of living of all segments of the population, reducing the gulf between the
wealthiest and the poorest and helping to increase leisure time.
4.
A
change in values and primary objectives will make crime senseless, as money
acquired by illegal means will not so easily create a favorable position in
society (through the purchase of status symbols). The importance of a person,
his or her access to tools and physical protection will be formed, above all, on
the basis of socially useful achievements, taking into account only legally
earned money and a person’s real merits.
5.
The
new values will change people’s worldview, molding a new, more rational, wholesome
and thoughtful state of mind. Symbols, conventions, and external forms will
lose their previous value, giving way to knowledge and elevating in people’s consciousness
the importance of essence rather than form and external appearance. For
example, racial and ethnic prejudices will become a thing of the past.
