Therefore the Lord God sent him [Adam] forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. Genesis. 3:23

And so Adam, driven from Eden for his lack of discrimination, is told what every father tells a grown son: get a job. Because of technology, not many Adams 'till the ground' any longer.(1) Nevertheless most, at least until recently, have been, 'gainfully employed.' But that may be ending as we enter into 'the workerless world.'

First a quick bit of current history: fiber optic and satellite communications technology, linking worldwide computer networks, has created an embryonic global marketplace. To take advantage, businesses rush to grow bigger, doing more with fewer and fewer people. Hence, the rafts of mega-mergers, corporate downsizing, and fervor to automate. An alarming number of Adams as a result now find themselves walking the street.

From Eden onward, if the truth be admitted, Adam has been hell-bent on devising ways he wouldn't have to work so hard. Or, work at all. Well, finally Adam may get his wish—he may find himself among the permanently unemployed.

In his new book, The End of Work, Jeremy Rifkin sees the juggernaut of what he calls the "Third Industrial Revolution" (the first revolution began in 1815 with the automation of the English crofters; the second with the institution of assembly line production in the 1920s) introducing a level of automation that will ultimately create a virtually workerless world.

In such a world, having a full-time job will be a mark of status. As in the feudal system of the Middle Ages there will be the nobility and the peasants (but, at least the peasants then could still 'till the ground'(2)). In the world to come, we are told, the top layer will be the industry chieftains and their top managers, a kind of priestly elite, supported by castes of symbolic analysts and technophiles to massage the information and maintain the machines. The three groups below, comprising the largest strata of society, will be 1) temporary employees, 2) the permanently unemployed, and 3) the unemployable.

Writes Rifkin:
"We are set on a firm course to an automated future and will likely approach a near-workerless era, at least in manufacturing, by the early decades of the coming century. The service sector, while slower to automate, will probably approach a nearly automated state by the mid-decades of the next century. The emerging knowledge sector will be able to absorb a small percentage of the displaced labor, but not nearly enough to make a substantial difference in the rising unemployment figures. Hundreds of millions of workers will be permanently idled by the twin forces of globalization and automation. Others, still employed, will work far fewer hours in order to more equitably distribute the remaining work and provide adequate purchasing power to absorb the increases in production. As machines increasingly replace workers in the coming decades, the labor of millions will be freed from the economic process and the pull of the marketplace. Unused human labor is the central overriding reality of the coming era and the issue that will need to be confronted and addressed head-on by every nation if civilization is to survive the impact of the Third Industrial Revolution."

Rifkin scoffs at the idea of retraining:
"The very notion that millions of workers displaced by the re-engineering and automation of the agricultural, manufacturing, and service sectors can be retrained to be scientists, engineers, technicians, executives, consultants, teachers, lawyers and the like, and then somehow find the appropriate number of job openings in the very narrow high-tech sector, seems at best a pipe dream, and at worst a delusion."

If the problem of joblessness is not solved, Rifkin sees:

"A new form of barbarism waits just outside the walls of the modern world. Beyond the quiet suburbs, exurbs, and urban enclaves of the rich and near-rich lie millions upon millions of destitute and desperate human beings."

Rifkin's solution is to empower what he calls "the Third Sector," made up of charity and community-based organizations which will step in to provide the basic services of aid and assistance that government cutbacks preclude. Government will fund this sector (presumably by taxing the corporations, who increasingly are multi-nationals with headquarters in tax havens) and provide the necessary incentives in terms of tax deductions for volunteer time and what he terms "social wages" instead of welfare that is earned by work within communities.

Rifkin concludes his study with the declaration:
"The end of work could spell a death sentence for civilization as we have come to know it. The end of work could also signal the beginning of a great social transformation, a rebirth of the human spirit."

Though Rifkin's analysis is penetrating and his Third Sector solution provocative, the future he envisions depends on the continuance of globalization and automation.

But we look more to the breakup of the global marketplace rather than its continuance. For a simple reason: massive jobless populations, their hopelessness and idleness a breeding ground for crime and terrorism, no nation can long endure. Therefore, as nations lose their industrial bases and jobs, they will resort to trade wars to protect them. Unable to sustain their economies for long in isolation, nations will combine into great superstate economies.

George Orwell, political writer and visionary, predicted that the world would break up into three great superstates: 1) Oceania, comprised of North America, South America, Britain and South Africa; 2) Eurasia, by Europe and Russia; 3) Eastasia, by China, Japan and rest of Asia. These self-contained economies would gear production and consumption to each another, and so, Orwell believed, "the scramble for markets which was a main cause of previous wars would come to an end." But a hierarchical society, he believed, could only be sustained by an ignorant and impoverished working class. Jobs are essential for societal stability and so industry must produce goods to keep workers working, but with no or little increase in income levels. "Goods must be produced," said Orwell, "but they must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this is by continuous warfare." A permanent low-grade war between the three superstates would thus maintain the hierarchy and keep the ruling class in power.(3)

(Aldous Huxley, Orwell's fellow Englishman and visionary, saw the masses being subdued in a novel way. Huxley believed that the modern way of controlling people was not through pain as in the days of yore, but through pleasure. In times of crises "the masses would be urged to buy tranquilizers and vision-producers. Under the influence of these soothing syrups they could be relied upon to give their master no trouble."(4) )

A deeper issue lies with the perceived value of the masses themselves. As the need for, and thus the value of, human labor diminishes, humans themselves become 'surplus' from an economic viewpoint. Moreover, as with India and other third world countries, poverty would breed large families, the only 'insurance' the poor can get. Larger and larger populations would require an enormous supply of resources to maintain. Masses of permanently unemployed and the unemployable (think of all the cocaine babies, their nervous systems impaired forever) make the message of films like Soylent Green not so absurd.

The solution to a workerless world may not lie on the level of the problem, that is, the planet earth. Interstellar space flight and habitation of other planets could be Adam's real destiny. The means we have already. Only the vision, confidence, and will are necessary

All the foregoing, of course, is only speculation. What is certain is that we are in a technological and social transition zone where deep uncertainty, even anxiety, abounds.

It is interesting to recall that Gurdjieff advised students to get a job they "could do with their left hand." He also said: "Remember that work cannot begin and cannot proceed on a level lower than that of the obyvatel, that is, on a level lower than ordinary life." He spoke, too, of "the abnormally established conditions of existence" he found in the West in the 1920s. Now we have entered a period in which few can chose which job they will work at, if they are working at all, and 'ordinary life,' defined, say, by how most people spend their time, is anything but 'ordinary.'

But this, if we can live it, is Gurdjieff country. Just a glance, say, at the de Hartmanns' Our Life with Mr. Gurdjieff gives a feeling for the tumultuous world-time in which Gurdjieff appeared. Uncertainty and anxiety abounded then, too. His students had to face civil war, famine, the loss of homeland, friends, and family. It might have sapped and crushed them. Instead, Gurdjieff showed them how to live with uncertainty, make use of it.

Some sense of what was undergone is given in Ouspensky's letter written on July 25, 1919, and smuggled out of Russia for publication in Orage's New Age in England. As the words are read listen to the tone of voice:

"During this period we have lived through so many marvels that I honestly pity everybody who has not been here, everybody who is living in the old way, everybody who is ignorant of what we now know. You do not even know the significance of the words 'living in the old way.' You have not the necessary perspective; you cannot get away from yourselves and look at yourselves from another point of view. But we did so long ago. To understand what 'living in the old way' means, you would need to be here, in Russia, and to hear people saying, and yourself, too, from time to time 'Shall we ever live again in the old way?...' For you this phrase is written in a quite unintelligible language—do not try to understand it! You will surely begin to think that it is something to do with the re-establishment of the old regime or the oppression of the working classes, and so on. But in actual fact it means something quite simple. It means, for example: When shall we be able to buy shoe-leather again, or shaving-soap, or a box of matches…

"We know too much to be able to speak to you on equal terms. We know the true relation of history and words to facts. We know what such words as 'civilization' and 'culture' mean; we know what 'revolution' means, and 'a Socialist State' and 'winter,' and 'bread,' and 'stove,' and 'soap', and many, many more of the same kind. You have no sort of idea of them.

"We know that 'war,' and 'politics,' and 'economic life'—in a word, all those things about which one reads in the papers, and in which those big dimensional creatures called Nations and States live and move and have their being—we know that all this is one thing, but that the life of individual men and women is quite another thing, having no points of contact with the former, except when it does not allow the latter to live. We know now that the whole life of individual men and women is a struggle against these big creatures. We are able to understand without difficulty that a Nation is a creature standing on a far lower stage of development than individual men and women."(5)

And so every period has its issues and dilemmas. Societal answers are long in coming and are the answers of Ouspensky's "big creatures." Individual ones are more free and immediate and born of clarity, courage, and will. It is in the nurturing of these inner qualities founded on a ground of self-remembering that one chooses one's influences, one's answers, one's way through life.

Adam should perhaps commit to memory Psalm 23 where it is said Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil: for thou art with me: thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.…

(1) The number of farmer workers in the United States has fallen from 23 million in 1950 to less than five million in 1990.

(2) An esoteric interpretation of having to "till the ground" may be the loosening and turning over of one's own 'ground'; that is, working with the lower centers and not the higher, as Gurdjieff stresses.

(3) 1984, George Orwell, pgs. 153-57. Orwell, we think, rightly sees that an all-round increase in wealth would threaten what he calls "a hierarchical society." Certainly a secular one. (See Parabola, Volume IX, Number 1, for another view of hierarchy). He also makes the point that if inequality concerning wealth were ended, then "wealth would confer no distinction." According to Gurdjieff, inequality is necessary for evolution… "Everything in nature has its aim and its purpose, both the inequality of man and his suffering. To destroy inequality would mean destroying the possibility of evolution." Search, pp. 307-08.

(4) Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley, p. 89. Already whole lines of clothes made from hemp are being marketed by Calvin Klein and others. This will lead to more and more hemp farms and it will be hard to keep hemp "down on the farm." The coffee houses of today may be the cannabis sativa houses of tomorrow. Abstracting the masses from their bodies and the physical world, too, is the growing "Cyber Culture." Already computer games such as Ascendancy take 100 hours to play. Intellectually addictive, the more multi-layered the game, the more time the player must invest. The 'hermetic' quality of the experience leads to a kind of cyber-initiation and fraternity which gamemakers promote.

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