The scholarship system was a piece of social engineering from some sort of long term generosity of mind of the people who set up that school. The dole, you know, why does the dole exist? It exists because somebody thought it was repulsive that people should be poor in a society where there was a lot of money going around, that some people should be very, very poor. It seemed objectionable. Doesn’t seem objectionable to a lot of people these days, which is interesting. So these forms of social engineering appeared and, as I say, I think they represent a sort of altruism, a generosity towards the future, which I think is just starting to find its time now.
We are now in a new era. We come from an era of scarcity, basically, economic scarcity – and when all of economics is based on the idea of scarcity and the idea of competition for resources. What we’re moving into, I think – this is explored in Paul Mason’s book Post Capitalism and in David Graber’s books and various other people are writing about it. What we’re moving into is an era of abundance. And co-operation. We’re super-productive, we’re going to become even more productive as we automate, and we’re going to become even less connected to the production, because automation means robotisation and it means that humans are less necessary to that process.
So, what are we all going to be doing? We’re going to be in a world of ultrafast change. It’s really accelerating at the moment and will continue to. And we’re going to have to somehow stay coherent. What are we going to be doing? I think we’re going to be even more full-time artists than we are now.
And I don’t just mean the professionals like me, I mean everybody, is going to have to be constantly involved in this activity that I was describing earlier of being able to resynchronise with each other, to connect things together, to be able to make adventurous mind games about different futures, to be able to understand things.
There are some interesting social initiatives now. There’s one called Basic Income. I don’t know if you have heard of that. This is the idea that everybody should get a wage. Everybody. Whether they work or not. So that we simply eliminate poverty in one step like that. There would be no more poor people. You think ‘Jesus, that sounds ridiculous.’ It isn’t ridiculous, actually – you might want to read about it.
Another thing that tells you about the future we’re moving into is the open-source movement. Where people, instead of producing ideas, carefully defending them, and keeping all the rewards from them are starting to share ideas… Altruism. Altruism has a kind of a new face. Writers like William McCaskill are starting to think let’s get rational about altruism. We have to be more altruistic…
So, all of these challenges require us to constantly be remoulding ourselves… What we tend to do is we get a sense of what everybody else is thinking about things and we sort of work out our attitudes in relation to everybody else, as we generally think quite collectively. I think it’s good that we do. I think it’s very important that we have more and more of the mechanisms for doing that. This is why I think we need to be thinking about art and culture not as a little add-on, a bit of luxury, but as the central thing that we do…
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Excerpts from Brian Eno’s BBC (John Peel) Lecture, 2015, with paragraph arrangements and emphasis added by ELLOPOS BLOG. Cf. Brian Eno @ Amazon.
